Swiss and gay in Chicago

by David Jordan
I'm a Swissy.
My mother's future father, teenage Joseph Dayer, immigrated in 1896 to rural Arkansas from Hérémence, a small village in the Pennine Alps in the Swiss canton Valais. And I'm gay.
Can I link my nationality and my homosexuality (Swiss + sissy = Swissy)?
That I'm a Swiss-American and a gay man are both in my DNA?
In Chicago, my Irish-American father, who died in 1993, made it clear that half my nationality was his, while my Swiss-American mother's true nationality was long obscured. As a child, I thought I was French, because my mother's parents, both of whom died when I was a toddler, had spoken French.
For an extremely (perhaps ridiculously) long time, I lived as a heterosexual, to the point of dating only women, getting married and having a quarter-Swiss daughter.
Now, in the spring of 2008 as I write, as a divorced, 48-year-old, celibate, unemployed journalist, living, on U.S. Social Security disability income, at my elderly, widowed mother's Chicago home, I'm looking to extend my sexual-orientation coming out, which I initiated in 2004 with my then-wife, then quickly furthered with close family and friends.
So, though it's doubtlessly dubious, I'm using the Swissy linking.
But enough about me already.
In the 19th century, several hundred Swiss settled in the U.S. state of Arkansas, which remains sparsely populated in the 21st century. Today, about 51 people per square mile occupy the approximately 53,000-square-mile state, which, according to a 2007 estimate by the U.S Census Bureau, has a total population of 2.8 million. By comparison, the tiny, 2,020-square-mile, Swiss state (canton) of Valais, with several of the highest peaks in Switzerland and a population under 300,000, has roughly thrice the population density of Arkansas.
Particularly, the Swiss immigrants, less numerous in the gently sloping farmland of central Arkansas than the Germans, settled there after the U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865, near the Arkansas River, which flows east from the Rocky Mountains for 1,450 miles, cutting across Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and the breadth of central Arkansas, through the state capital, Little Rock, which is some 30 miles away from Conway, to the south, and on to the mighty Mississippi.
More particularly, having come from the Val d'Hérens region, where the powerful Rhône River cuts through the cantonal capital, Sion, Valais farmers settled in and near the small town of Conway, near Cadron Creek, an Arkansas River tributary.
Around Conway, the seat of Faulkner County, near the geographical center of Arkansas, the Mississippi Valley soil grew rich in cotton.
Among the Valaisans seeking abundant arable land in the Jim Crow former Confederate state of Arkansas was, in 1896, the family of Jean-Antoine Dayer, my great-grandfather, Joseph's father. It was around three-quarters of a century after the native inhabitants of the neighborhood, the Osage, had been removed to the Indian Territory (later called Oklahoma) after the tribe had, in the early 1800s, ceded the area, then part of the Louisiana Territory, to the United States.
Jean-Antoine Dayer moved from Hérémence, elevation 4,058 feet, to near Conway, elevation 321 feet, with his wife, two daughters and three sons, including my grandfather Joseph, who would have 19 Arkansas children by two Hérémence wives, and Nicolas, who, at age 20, after 10 years in Arkansas, returned permanently to Hérémence, where he married, had 11 children and spent half a century as guardian of a cabin for mountain climbers high in the Valais Alps.
Jean-Antoine's friend Jean-Baptiste Moix had immigrated to Arkansas in 1895 from a tiny village, St.-Martin, neighboring Hérémence. Moix, married with four children, was following in the footsteps of others from Val d'Hérens, including friends of his in the Luyet and Mayor families, and he apparently convinced two other Moix families to also settle in the Conway area after they had first immigrated to South America, one to Brazil, one to Argentina.
Jean-Baptiste Moix co-signed, in January of 1896, for the $350 purchase of 80 acres of wild, swampy land near Conway to be Jean-Antoine's farm, according to a document found at the Faulkner County courthouse in genealogical research a century later by his granddaughter, my aunt, Rose Daugherty, the matriarch of the large Dayer clan in Conway, her lifetime home, and even in other U.S. regions to which Jean-Antoine's ancesters had scattered. Rose, who died in 2006, left behind her grandchildren, daughters and longtime husband, Jim Daugherty, whose farm remains a relic from a more rural time.
The Dayers apparently didn't occupy the property that Jean-Baptiste Moix had signed for, but swapped it for another wild parcel nearby.
In "The story of Valaisans who emigrated to the U.S.A.," a 1976 Valais newspaper article by Camille Dayer, who had married Nicolas Dayer's daughter Alexandrine, the son-in-law wrote that in early 1896 Jean-Antoine Dayer, with his wife, Marie-Catherine (née Tournier), and their five children, had traveled two weeks by ship from Le Havre, France, to New York, then three days by train to Conway.
"But after the difficulties of the sea voyage," Camille Dayer wrote, "they, who had come from the dry Valais, suffered terribly from the damp climate in the Plains of Arkansas. Their cotton fields were often flooded. (Three) years after their arrival, mother Catherine (age 49) and her son Charles (10) died of fever."
Around 1900, Jean-Baptiste's eldest son and daughter married Jean-Antoine's eldest daughter and son. John Moix married Mary Dayer, and they had six children. Marie-Victoire Moix married Joseph Dayer, and they had eight surviving children.
In 1900, the U.S. Census counted 679 Swiss-born residents among Arkansas' 1.3 million population. (In all of the United States, which had a total population of more than 76 million in 1900, there were 10.5 million foreign-born residents, 116,000 of them from Switzerland.)
In Faulkner County, only 130 people were Swiss immigrants – 0.63 percent of its 1900 population of 20,780. That 130, however, represented Faulkner's largest population of foreign-born residents (Germans were second at 124), and it was more Swiss-born folks than in any of Arkansas' 75 counties. The second most, 104 Swiss in 1900, lived in bordering Pulaski County, home of Little Rock. (In Pulaski, the Swiss were outnumbered by the Germans at 1,287, the Irish at 259 and the English at 207.)
Immigration to the United States spiked hugely during the second half of the 19th century – a period when an estimated 5,000 Valaisans settled in North and South America – and spilled into the early 20th century.
One Valaisan, Philomene Dayer, 22, traveled to Arkansas from her Hérémence home in about 1920 with Joseph Dayer, 39, no relation, and in Conway she became his new wife in the spring of 1921.
Joseph's first wife, Marie-Victoire, had died in 1918 at age 41, and the depressed widower had gone back to Hérémence, where he met Philomene, who bore him 11 Arkansas children, including, in 1925, my mother, Anne-Marie Dayer.
It seems that for many years there was little or no contact between the Dayer clans on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Then, in 1969 Emil Dayer, one of Joseph's 14 sons, traveled to Hérémence to meet relatives.
In 1976, the first ancestral kin to visit America from Valais were Nicolas Dayer's daughter Alexandrine, who died in 1977, and her husband, Camille Dayer, of Martigny.
In the newspaper article he wrote shortly after that 1976 trip, Camille Dayer recalled meeting "the families Moix, Mayor, Masserey, Germanier, Troillet, Favre, Dussex, Rudaz and Dayer, who are descended from Valaisans who emigrated to the States between 1800 and 1900. They live in big farms in the vast Plains of Arkansas."
Since Camille's first visit, and his second, in the 1980s, there has been much cross-Atlantic communication and visiting. Today, there are many warm cross-Atlantic friendships between descendants of Jean-Antoine Dayer in Valais and in many American locales, including Illinois, California, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
It has been a long time since many Western Europeans immigrated to the United States, or to anywhere for that matter.
For the 2000 census, the U.S. Census Bureau said that of Faulkner County's estimated 86,014 population, 588 people claimed Swiss ancestry, or 0.68 percent, which was more than twice the percentage of Swiss living among the 300 million Americans nationwide.
All of Faulkner's 588 Swiss were born in the United States. Their median age was 33, and only 26 of them spoke a language other than English at home.
In Conway, population 43,199 in 2000, those claiming Swiss ancestry totaled 414, or 0.96 percent of the total.
In Little Rock, 429 of the 183,558 total claimed Swiss ancestry, or 0.23 percent.In the city of Chicago, where I'm a native resident among the total population of about 3 million, only about 3,000 people, or 0.1 percent, identified themselves as having Swiss heritage, an even smaller minority than gays.