What follows is the summary of an article (which I basically understand) that touches a bit on the genetic structure of inhabitants of selected Swiss villages, and to some degree their descendents elsewhere. It appeared in the Annals of Human Biology, 1996, Vol. 23, no. 6, pages 431-455, and was entitled, "Isonymy and the genetic structure of Switzerland; I. The distributtion of surnames" by I. Barrai, C. Scapoli, et al. "The surname distribution of the population of Switzerland was studied using a sample of 1,702,000 private users registered for the year 1994 in the Helvetic Telephone Directory. These users were distributed in four linguistic areas, in 26 cantons and 271 communes of the Confederation. Estimates of unbiased random isonymy, of Fisher's "a", an indicator of abundance of surnames converging to the allele effective number in standard genetic polymorphisms, and of Karlin-McGregor's "v", an indicator of immigration rates, were calculated for each Commune, each Canton, each linguistic area and for the whole confederation. The Commune with the highest value of "a" was Geneva ("a" = 5312) followed by Versoiz (3713) and by the Communes of Vaud on the north shore of Lake Leman, Chavannes (3381), Montreux (3200), Nyon (3114), and Lausanne (3109). The Italian-speaking communes of the Ticino were next. The lowest value ("a" = 29) was observed in Poschiavo, south of the Berninapass; "a" = 39 was observed in Einsiedeln (Schwyz); then Mels and Widnau (62 and 67, Canton of St. Gallen), Frutigen in Bern (72); and Appenzell (80). Accordingly, the highest consanguinity values were observed in the Grisons and in the nucleus of the founding Cantons, while the lowest were observed in the Cantons of Geneva and Vaud, preferential areas of immigration to Switzerland from abroad. The effect of subdivision on isonymy is large at the Commune level, and decreases in Cantons and linguistic groups. French and Italian languages indicate minor, German and Romanisch major inbreeding." The gist of this is that the authors of the article found that the population in places such as Frutigen (where my patrilineal line is supposed to have come from), Poschiavo, Einsiedein, Mels, Widnau, and Appenzell have relatively few surnames compared with practically all other communes of similar population size in Switzerland, which means that in-migration from elsewhere has been historically low and consequently due to inter-marriage almost everyone there is probably related to some extent to everyone else. Dale Bricker

> Von: dbricker@cyburban.com [mailto:dbricker@cyburban.com] > Gesendet: Dienstag, 26. Juli 2005 20:06 > [...] > What follows is the summary of an article. > [...] > The gist of this is that the authors of the article found that the > population in places such as Frutigen (where my patrilineal line is > supposed to have come from), Poschiavo, Einsiedeln, Mels, Widnau, and > Appenzell have relatively few surnames compared with practically all > other communes of similar population size in Switzerland, which means > that in-migration from elsewhere has been historically low and > consequently due to inter-marriage almost everyone there is probably > related to some extent to everyone else. Possibly I shouldn't comment on an article which I haven't read myself - I hope Dale puts me right if my asumption is incorrect. From the above I get the impression, that a genealogical relation is always assumed for people with the same surname. I often read this asumption between the lines of queries sent to me - and it's simply wrong! In German (not sure about Rumantsch) there are several very common surnames, carried by hundreds (or even thousands) of families with no genealogical connection whatsoever - just consider all the Meier, Schmid, Huber, Keller, .... - there are no really equivalent surnames in French and Italian speaking parts of the world. If this feeling of mine is correct, this would mean the above study is heavily biased towards high consanguinuity in the Geramn speaking part of Switzerland - which in turn renders any conclusion from this study questionable, to say the least. Conclusions of this kind will be much less biased when comparing single communities within a common language reagion, of course. There are several areas (and I guess you can find these all over the world) where for geographical or religios (and possibly other) reasons in-migration has been very low - of the above especially Poschiavo will qualify for geographical reasons, might also apply to Frutigen and Einsiedeln, I would not necessarily expect Mels and Widnau here. Best regards - Wolf __________________ Wolf Seelentag, Ph.D. Reherstr. 19 CH - 9016 St.Gallen +41 (0) 71 - 288 51 21 wolf.seelentag@swissonline.ch