Running commentary

On November 19, I jogged along a country lane in sort of a dream-like state, not fully believing not only that was I in Switzerland; I was running toward the small village from which my great grandparents Charles (Karl) Kanzig and Marie Lerch Kanzig emigrated over 120 years ago.

Back in the 1980s, I found a postcard in a trunk my mother owned that was filled with odds and ends of family history. The picture included a scene of a simple street in a Swiss village. The writer had drawn an arrow to part of a long, three story building with a note: "This is where your grandfather's family lived in Wiedlisbach."

The postcard had been sent by an unknown relative of my father's many years earlier and provided the scant evidence of the Kanzig family history in Switzerland.

We had very little to go on because my father shared only bits and pieces before his early death in 1975. The fact that he was an only child left us with no aunts or uncles to question and our grandparents had died much earlier.

Since that time, I have sporadically investigated in a number of ways to find out more. It's been somewhat fruitless, but things are looking up.

Genealogy searches and other evidence supported the notion that the village of Wiedlisbach had indeed served as the home town of the Kanzigs for many generations. My great-grandparents left Switzerland in 1890 and originally landed in Saginaw, Michigan, where my grandfather was born in 1892.

From there, the trail backwards gets sketchy because my great-grandfather seems to have disappeared from the record for the most part both in the U.S. and in Switzerland.

For that and other reasons, I have felt the pull to visit Wiedlisbach for many years, but never seemed to be able to pull together the timing or money to make the trip. That is, until this fall when an opportunity fell in my lap.

As a college counselor in South Korea, I received an invitation to visit two of the finest hospitality/business schools in the world that happen to be located in Switzerland. When I say invited, I mean, "all-expenses-paid invited." I seized the opportunity and immediately sent a letter expressing my interest.

The two schools I was invited to visit, Les Roches and Glion, are very appropriate to the students at our school, but the students often balked at the location because most had never spent time in Europe. My going would help me be able to counsel them more appropriately and knowledgeably.

My acceptance left me overjoyed, especially when my request to extend my return ticket through the weekend was approved. It would be a tight schedule, but I now had two days to go find Wiedlisbach after my stay in Montreux.

With a bit of historical record tucked in my journal and a couple of contacts made in advance, I went to search of some other "real" Kanzigs, none of which I had ever found in my life.

I took the train from Montreux to Oberbipp where I had a reservation at the Hotel Baeren, located two kilometers from Wiedlisbach. When I emerged from the train, I felt strangely at home. This may have been because the climate and geography of the placed resembled my town in Sublimity, Oregon - green hills covered with pine and fir trees, grey sky with a hint of rain - but it may have also been because I had imagined this moment for over 30 years.

I quickly stowed my bags at my cozy room at the bed and breakfast, changed into my running clothes and trotted toward Wiedlisbach.

At the city limits I took a selfie using my cell phone, with the sign indicating my arrival in Wiedlisbach in the background.

It is an afternoon I will always remember.

I wandered through the cobblestone streets of the "old town," including right to the very building that I had originally seen in the postcard. I had two other destinations before it got too late.

First I made my way to the edge of town where the cemetery lay. I had heard before my arrival that I would not find any old gravestones there due to the practice of grave marker removal every 25 years. Still, I wanted to verify that Kanzig was a well-established name in the area by seeing the past generation.

I found 16 Kanzigs in the small cemetery, which happened to be cared for in a way that would make any landscape designer envious. While the names on the stones had no known direct connection to my family line, I still felt some satisfaction in seeing them in this place.

Dinner proved to be a true highlight at the Restaurant Rebstock, owned and operated by Kanzigs since 1910. Elizabeth Kanzig, the proprietor, and her fourteen-year-old son Nicklaus, provided friendly conversation over one of the best meals I have had in years. Elizabeth's husband Gerhardt took the name Kanzig when they married. The couple has a ten-year-old daughter Kiersten as well and all four love the outdoors. Gerhardt runs marathon and Nicklaus loves mountain biking, so I gave them a heartfelt invitation to come to Sisters to discover the kind of hiking, running, and mountain biking we have to offer.

Elizabeth's mother, Marion, who is 72, confirmed that Kanzigs lived in the "old village" depicted in my postcard for many years, including one Kanzig who specialized in working with leather.

Sadly, records have been lost over the years and some are held in the larger municipality of Bern and not accessible at the local level. I could not find anything locally about my great-grandparents or their three daughters born in Wiedlisbach, so I turned my attention to my great grandmother, Marie Lerch. Just as I was running out of time for my visit, I made contact with the one Lerch family still living in Wiedlisbach, but alas, they were not at home when I stopped by and I had a train to catch.

Wiedlisbach, unlike villages of it size, is actually the smallest city in Switzerland, a label it fought for years ago when the government decreed that cities had to have a population of at least 10,000. At just over 2,000 inhabitants, this little city will celebrate 500 years of existence in June 2016.

I fully intend to be there and perhaps by then, have a more complete picture of the Swiss connection in my family history.\