Egodocuments.ch is a database featuring more than 1,700 personal writings – autobiographies, diaries of all kinds, travel accounts, account books, chronicles, and family books – written between 1500 and 1820, and preserved in archives and libraries across Switzerland’s four linguistic regions.
As a work in progress, the platform provides access to a growing number of digitized documents and transcriptions.
Do you own or have you discovered an interesting, unpublished personal document? Are you a researcher interested in contributing a document presentation?
Feel free to get in touch with us via the contact form.
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Current Project: A Study of Personal Writing Practices in Valais (1500–1820)
The present project examines practices of personal writing in the Valais region during the early modern period (1500–1820), studying their specific features and developments. This territory serves as a privileged observatory for exploring the very status of everyday writing and its rise—as well as the purposes that male and female writers assigned to these practices—within a context that is both Catholic and rural. At the same time, the project aims to bring greater visibility to particularly interesting, meaningful, or distinctive texts preserved in the private collections of the canton’s archival institutions, by by describing them on egodocuments.ch.
Update : 04.12.2025