Felix Frey Article published

Felix notified me that his article has been published in a book about St. Gallen history.
He sent a copy to me in Adobe Acrobat format which I have tried to publish on the Staeheli facebook page and in this blog.


My technical skills are insufficient to publish an Adobe document on facebook or here.


Although the article is written in Swiss German it is possible to scan for names such as Theresia and Daphne and the name Staeheli which shows up in the text. There is a Staeheli family photo from our web site.


I attempted to translate the article using Google translate but the result is not intelligible.


Felix will send a copy of the book to me which I can scan and publish here so we can view it.


Meanwhile, I think it is possible to forward the Adobe document to your email. Anyone interested can send a request and I will forward the Adobe document to you to open on your device.


Please send your request to tstalyjr@charter.net

Felix Frey Article, first contact

I received this email in April, 2018.


Dear Mr Staly,
With great interest I read your research on the Staly-Stäheli family history. I grew up in a town called Herisau and spent a lot of time at Lake Gübsen (Gübsensee) during childhood and youth. It's both tragic and fascinating to see how the formation of the lake changed local people's lives so drastically in 1898/1899.


 Why did I find your research online? By profession, I am a historian specialized on Eastern Europe (USSR and the Balkans) and work at the University of Bern. Since I'm very interested in the history of energy and wrote my PhD in this field (energy history of a Russian region), I decided to engage in a local history of energy too. Therefore, I explored the HPP near my hometown, which happens to be the Kubelwerk which is so closely related to your family's history!


 The paper I'm writing will be part of a book on the Cantonal (State) history of St. Gallen. This professional collected work focuses on social history. I work with archival sources from the St. Gallen State Archive and published resources of the analyzed time (approx. 1890-1905). The history of the Stäheli family is an ideal example of what I want to show in the paper: Energetic infrastructures are not neutral technological installations, far away from the "human world", but affect(ed) people's lives massively in manifold ways.


I would very much like to incorporate the Stäheli story into my paper. Therefore, I want to ask you if you would like to support the endeavor with your insight and/or photographies, archival records or the like? I would be very grateful for any detail you could add to the processes that led to the departure of the Stähelis from Gübsenmoos and their first years in the States. Of course, your support would be thanked for in the first footnote of the paper, as it is custom in the field.


I'm looking forward to your answer and send my best regards to Washington State,


Felix Frey