Looking Forward to Reach Backwards

 

To research our ancestors, the presumption is that we start with ourselves, then step by step, we work backwards in time from generation to generation—until, that is, we run into a research brick wall. Stymied, we twist and turn every which way, trying to find a path around the records impasse. For probably as long as people have been curious about their roots, that path to the past could only be traveled in one direction: backwards through time.

Now, however, we have another option: looking forward. And we reverse course, so to speak, by looking at a very different type of record, not from the past, but forward from those great-greats who've given us the slip.

In the case of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Schneider, I'll certainly keep searching for eighteenth century records to reveal his origin in Europe, but I have another treasure trove of information awaiting my attention: Nicholas Schneider's descendants, those DNA matches who, along with my husband as test proxy for my mother-in-law's line, share Nicholas as their most recent common ancestor.

When I started this month's research project for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, I began working my way through these DNA matches using the Ancestry.com ThruLines tool. According to that readout, my husband shares an ancestral connection to Nicholas Schneider with 268 other AncestryDNA customers. And I don't think it's owing to my active imagination that that number seems to be rapidly sprouting. According to Ancestry.com, when I make changes to my mother-in-law's tree—for instance, adding another generation of Schneider descendants I've just discovered—the company will update the program in about forty eight hours.

Considering this Schneider—and, later, Snider and Snyder—family has been the one line that pumps up my biweekly count the most, I'm not surprised that ThruLines connections to this ancestor keep zooming upward. Each generation of this large Catholic family brings multiple more members to my mother-in-law's tree—and, forty eight hours after adding these new cousins to the family tree, can link me to more ThruLines results.

Of those 268 Schneider DNA matches at Ancestry's ThruLines, I've gleaned the breakdown by the seven of Nicholas' children who are currently represented in the tool: six sons, one daughter, plus one additional name which I believe was actually a grandson. Of those, the child with the largest set of DNA matches, by far, is eldest son Jacob, who was also on my mother-in-law's direct line. As I make the connection between my husband's record and Jacob's eighty DNA descendants—so far—I'm being careful to also connect each DNA match entry to all available records, as well as add any of his descendants I might previously have missed. End result? You can be sure those additional entries to my mother-in-law's family tree will yield more future DNA matches.

It's a truly roundabout method to push farther into the family's past, but as I've found before in following collateral lines, you never know when a record for someone else in the family will produce an unexpected link with just the information needed that couldn't be found elsewhere.

No Longer Etched in Stone

 

We may take comfort in the apparent permanence of the names of our departed loved ones, etched in stone above their final resting place. We want to remember them for the cherished members of our family they were—and we want others to know we cared for them through such permanent memorials.

When it comes to ancestors like my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Schneider, however, his name is no longer etched in stone—if it ever was. According to details posted by a Find A Grave volunteer, Nicholas died on March 4, 1856, and was buried in the cemetery of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Somerset, Ohio. That information was not obtained from his headstone, but from church records, according to the site's note.

Whether that need to check church records was owing to the weathering of an old headstone, I can't tell, but I have run across other websites for Perry County—immigrant Nicholas Snider's last home in Ohio—which included transcriptions for old cemeteries. One example from an old website included multiple Snider family members in its listings—but not Nicholas. Another, from a different Perry County cemetery, was a compilation of several sources, including some which were readings from cemetery visits in the 1970s, as well as gleanings from old church records. Some headstones were no longer legible; some were no longer located at the deceased's burial site but were simply stones found in a pile on the grounds.

No matter what happened to Nicholas Snider's headstone—or that of his wife, Anna Elizabeth Eckhardt—we can tell from the 1850 census that the couple and several of their family members had lived in Hopewell Township in Perry County. Indeed, following the census trail backwards in time, "Nicholass Snider" and his sizable family had arrived in Perry County before the 1820 census.

Before that point, his trail westward had led from Adams County, Pennsylvania, and possibly a stopping point in Maryland, before heading to Ohio. While I already have some documentation located which suggests that pathway, there is much more work yet to do. But the prime question revolves around the family's arrival from their likely origin somewhere in the lands which now make up the country of Germany. And the key is finding actual documentation of that information, not just reports published by other researchers.

I have yet to be successful on such a venture, though I tried to do so the last time I visited this research question three years ago. On the other hand, with each successive year, we see more and more resources added to genealogy collections online, which boost the possibility for future research success. Maybe this will be my breakthrough year. 

Nicholas: Patriarch of Many

 

With the beginning of a new month, we not only move on to researching another ancestor, but we shift from pursuing those ancestors from my mother's family to those from my mother-in-law's roots. For April, that selection is a man who was not only my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, but also her third great-grandfather.

If you are scratching your head over that seeming contradiction, let me explain. My mother-in-law's family came from central Ohio, where several branches of her family had lived since the earliest days of the 1800s. Over the generations in that relatively isolated community, the branches of her family intermarried until many in that county could say they were related to each other in several ways. So in my mother-in-law's instance, she could claim one patriarch, Nicholas Schneider, as her second great-grandfather through her paternal grandmother's line, while he was her third great-grandfather through her maternal grandmother's line.

That family name, though likely originating as Schneider from his native German homeland, was spelled as Snider for those who settled and stayed in central Ohio, but for those who moved on—first to Iowa, then in some cases beyond to Minnesota—the name was eventually spelled Snyder. Regardless of the spelling variations, I have traced many of these descendants, thanks to DNA testing, to confirm their relationship.

For this fourth selection of this year's Twelve Most Wanted, I would like to push back another generation—or at least find records from wherever he emigrated in the earliest years of the 1800s. That search will be my main challenge, but I have another goal: update work on the 268 DNA matches reported by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool as descendants of Nicholas to ensure those matches are all connected to my mother-in-law's family tree—a mammoth task, indeed.

For this patriarch of so many, we'll begin tomorrow with a brief overview of what I know already about him and the young family he brought with him from somewhere in Germany. Following that, I'll spotlight the two branches of Nicholas' family from whom my mother-in-law descends. Eventually, we'll discuss each of the other siblings I'm currently aware of, then begin the study of where that DNA leads us in the subsequent generations. Bottom line, though, is to seek out any further records that can point us to his passage to America, and the place he left behind on his trip to this fledgling country.