Based in Salt Lake City, you find: Ancestry.com and the FamilySearch Library. In particular the Brigham Young University has produced this remarkable document:
The internationally feared military power of the Confederation, the commerce and customs privileges enjoyed in neighboring countries and her growing prosperity allowed that self-assurance to grow continually from the 15th to the 18th century. Because of this, the citizenship for the confederated areas (cantons) became more valuable all the time. In the middle of the 16th century towns and villages started to control immigration and made it increasingly difficult to obtain citizenship. Finally, about the middle of the 17th century, it was entirely stopped, and new admissions became rare. This self-assurance together with the rarity of citizenShip, created an ideal medium for fostering genealogy.
Even the family names, without which genealogy is not entirely impossible, but would be an extremely difficult undertaking, are based on this clan pride (self-assurance). The nobility of one area started to carry regular family names during the 12th century. They were taken from the names of the castles where these noble families resided, as for example "von Kyburg" (Canton Zurich), "von Habsburg", "von Lenzburg" (Canton Aargaul. etc. Before then, high and low were called by their first name, and there evidently was not that clear concept of family and clan which expresses itself in a family name.
During the 12th century,cognomens and names of occupations appeared as an addition to the given name of town and country people, but these names changed often and it was long before they became fixed family names. In regard to the urban upper classes, these being wealthy people holding public office, such surnames started to become fixed family names during the 13th and 14th centuries. This process was completed at different times for the lower classes, the carftsmen, the poor and the peasants. The development was practically finished around 1500. During the 16th century, church and state, for order and control, finally established family names in their registers as labels of family relationship.
While the genealogy of nobility starts during the 12th century and earlier, with such as pedigree charts; family chronicles, etc.; the first traces of genealogy of the burghers of the cities and states appear during the 15th century. Such families that were part of the “regiment” (administration), cultivated their family history. This activity received special stimulus during the 16th century, carried on through the 17th century and reached its peak in the 18th century before the fall of the old Confederation (through the interference of the French Revolution in 1798).