Julius Billeter was born on October 13th in Igis in Canton Graubunden. He emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1884. Julius Billeter, then aged 22, married Maria Emilie Wilker from Wädenswil, Canton Zurich, on June 24th 1891. The wedding took place in Logan, Utah. Maria Emilie bore her husband five children. The first two were born in Salt Lake City, but the other three in Switzerland. Julius Billeter and his wife and children spent many years in Switzerland, where he devoted most of his life to genealogical research. He died in St Gallen on July 9th 1957, aged 87.

During the course of a number of lengthy visits to Switzerland,  Julius Billeter researched some 3000 familes in his own particular style. He used almost exclusively the baptismal, marriage and death registers of the parishes and the civil registration records of the communes. The details he recorded about individual families often cover several centuries, including the 20th. He wrote on B5 sheets, filling them with his extremely small handwriting and leaving no margin. He used some 72,500 such sheets, many of them written in pencil, with details of roughly 20-40 persons on each one. If one reckons 25 persons per sheet, that represents data on some two million people, equivalent to about a quarter of the present population of Switzerland. Truly the task of a lifetime!  

A few provisos need to be made about accuracy and omissions in Julius Billeter’s work. Given the huge number of hand-written personal and place names as well as dates that he looked at, it is not surprising that a check has revealed some omissions and errors. Mistakes are always possible with any genealogical research! But not all the mistakes which have crept into Billeter’s work are errors in copying. The most serious problem is with his attribution of children to parents, in particular with very common names like Johann, Christian, Jakob, etc. Where he could find no information about the earliest family members, the first dates are often the result of guess-work, but Billeter did not always include the word "about". The user should be wary about taking these and other data on trust without checking them.

The quality of Billeter’s work is vary variable, sometimes excellent and accurate, and at other times hasty and requiring caution. The very handwriting gives a hint of this. Not all the documents in the collection are in Billeter’s hand. There is no information as to when the copying was started or when it was completed, so it is possible that some families had died out in the meantime.

There is no source (parish register, volume, page number etc) given for most of the entries. Nor did Billeter always include the places of birth, marriage and death when they were available. It is understandable that with such a wealth of entries he decided to limit the amount of information included. Thus, for example, he ignored baptismal and marriage certificates.

Nevertheless, Billeter produced an extraordinary and very impressive piece of work, which will be of great use to many genealogists in the future, and not merely by showing them the way.

Copes of the sheets can be obtained from:
Frau Marie-Louise Gamma
4125 Riehen
Switzerland
[email protected]