A new Web site geared toward helping Americans trace their Swiss ancestry launched last week - in an effort to reach out to the more than one million Americans with Swiss ancestry. Developed by IgoUgo, the Swiss Roots site includes an illustrated timeline with important events in Swiss and American history, portraits of influential Swiss emigrants, message boards for connecting with other Swiss researchers, and a number of Swiss databases.

The search box at Swiss Roots does a pretty good job of uncovering alternate spellings for common surnames, including ones in the original alphabet with umlauts, etc. There aren't a lot of databases on the site as of yet, however. The biggest is an excerpt of the Ellis Island Records database, with entries which, according to Swiss Roots, have been corrected for misspellings and other errors (only the search database entries have been corrected, not the original data from the Ellis Islands database). Other genealogy databases of interest to Swiss researchers include the Swiss Family Name Handbook, Men of Bern, and links to Web sites dedicated to Swiss family names and genealogy.

The Swiss Roots Web site also offers a number of genealogical research tools, such as a list of 18th century Swiss Emigrants to the Americas, a Swiss Geographical Dictionary (in German), and suggestions for common American spellings of Swiss family names.

The Swiss Roots Web site is still young, but there is a lot of useful information - especially when you consider that it is all (at least for now) free!

Check it out for yourself at SwissRoots.org. If you have an opinion on the site, please feel free to post a comment!