Another Unfinished Saga

 

Another month's research project has come to a close, and it's time to wrap up what's been done this April and what needs to be picked up in the future. For now, I'll bid goodbye to another unfinished family saga—this time, for Nicholas Snider and his young family sailing to Pennsylvania from some unknown place in Germany.

What we already knew at the start of the month was that Nicholas Schneider and his wife, Anna Elizabeth Eckhardt had sailed with their young son Jacob from somewhere in Germany. By the time of the 1810 census, their family had grown to six people and they were living in Adams County, Pennsylvania. In the next ten years, somehow Nicholas and his son Jacob had obtained land in Perry County, Ohio, and moved his growing family there.

From that point, Nicholas—now sporting a surname with revised spelling, either Snyder or Snider—appeared in each decennial census through 1850. After that, the final official mention of his name was when his will was presented in court on April 27, 1855.

Nicholas and Anna Elizabeth left multiple descendants—265 of which I've been tracing through DNA matches—but so far no one has led me to verification that would answer my question: where did the Snider family come from? Unfortunately, that answer will have to wait until I revisit this question in a future year.

In the meantime, I can draw up a to-do list of sorts, something to jump start my search, the next time Nicholas is slated as one of my Twelve Most Wanted. The main goal at that point will be to search, page by page—unless those records have been indexed by that point—through the passenger records from Germany in the earliest years of the nineteenth century. Handwritten—and not necessarily done with the aplomb of a church cleric—these records are hard on the eyes, if even legible at all.

Another point I want to develop further: tracing Nicholas Snider's F.A.N. Club in Pennsylvania and the brief moment he brought his family to Maryland before their move to Ohio. On the list for records to garner: tax and land records in Adams County, and—on a wild offshoot—lists of men who served during the war of 1812, when Nicholas was not present for the baptism of his daughter Maria, back at home.

For records to search, I want to familiarize myself with the archival collections in Pennsylvania, a state in which I haven't done much research. While there is much to find on FamilySearch.org, as well as through my subscription at Ancestry.com, there are so many other resources available, both locally and at the state level, that should not be overlooked—especially, I might add, when we are dealing with a brick wall ancestor.

With that to-do list in hand, I'll send off Nicholas Snider and the mystery of his origin and connection to his native Germany, and welcome in a new research project with the beginning of May.

When Even Housework Sounds More Tempting Than Homework

 

Have you ever become so weary of working on a goal that task avoidance sets in and anything else—I mean anything, as in even housework—seems like the better thing to do? I'm afraid that's what has become of my quest to push back just one more generation on my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider.

Just one more generation—how hard can that be? But after pushing through for a full month with this genealogical homework assignment, I'm still wandering in circles. Granted, tackling 265 DNA matches can take up a wee bit of one's time—but right now, I only have eighteen more to go on Conrad's descendants, and he was the youngest of Nicholas Snider's children to match my husband's test. After that, I'll have to tackle the question of just why ThruLines decided to designate one of Nicholas Snider's grandsons as a son, but once I review those fourteen matches, hopefully the reason will become clear.

But trawling through page after page of non-indexed passenger records for the early 1800s? I just couldn't bring myself to do this last-hope task today. That's how spoiled I've become, so used to tapping in a name on my keyboard and seeing just the right page out of hundreds of possibilities appear on my screen.

I admit, I'll eventually haul myself over to the computer, sit down before the screen, and make myself page through the digitized records of early arrivals at the port of Philadelphia—the supposed port of Nicholas Snider's family's arrival. Or I can put that task on my to-do list for the next time I revisit this question about Nicholas Snider's roots. It is a tempting thought.

Not that I'm chomping at the bit to advance even a day earlier to May's candidate for my Twelve Most Wanted. For next month, I'll be tackling someone just as impossible. The question of her identity is only complicated by her untimely death during a period in Ohio history when records—not to mention, population settlements—were sparse. It may be time to practice those F.A.N. Club research techniques once again.

As for Nicholas Snider, hopefully I'll complete the DNA match review by tomorrow. And that will be time to recap what we've found, assess what still needs to be completed, and roll that task forward to another year's Twelve Most Wanted list.

"Nothing to See Here"

 

"Move along now; nothing to see here" may be a cliche from old cop movies, but it might fit quite nicely for an end-of-month predicament with my latest genealogical detective work. I'm not finding anything further on my research goal—immigrant Nicholas Snider—despite persistent effort.

Yes, today I did take the time to trawl through the baptismal records from Conewago Chapel in search of any Sniders—or those many other spelling permutations of the surname—living in Adams County, Pennsylvania, at the same time as my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas. Did I find anything of significance? Short answer: no.

Despite the abysmal handwriting which scrawled out the information I was seeking, I managed to find a mere five other couples with the surname Snider (or spelling variations) living in Adams County who also attended the church where Nicholas had his children baptized. One of the baptisms I found was likely too early to have happened while Nicholas and his family were there. Another was too late, since by then Nicholas had moved his family west to Ohio. But there were two baptisms within the time frame which would be just right.

The first entry was a baptism for Joseph "Shneider" on September 24, 1797. Though the handwriting was challenging to read, my best guess is that the parents were Antonii (?) and Catharina. Sponsors for this baby were also Shneiders, but again the handwriting challenged me to guess: Antonius and Carlara (?).

The latest entry was for a son of Francis Snyder and his wife Elizabeth Rhineheart, who was baptized on October 29, 1817. By then, our Nicholas would be heading west, so I didn't expect to see his name listed as godparent. However, the surname of the godparents looked like "Khune"—which I doubt was correct—but certainly not any variation on the name Snider.

But what about the other two baptisms? A Catharina Shneider, baptized on June 4, 1801—again, likely before Nicholas arrived in this country—was the daughter of Peter and Catherine. What encouraged me to dig deeper was the name of the godparents: Martin and Catherine Gossman. Well, I'm assuming that surname was Gossman; it was written with the double "s" style of handwriting prevalent at the time; otherwise it would appear to be Gofman. At any rate, Gossman has been a surname that has intermarried with later generations of Nicholas Snider's descendants, something to follow up on when I revisit this research questions.

The final possibility for baptisms showing other possible kin to our Nicholas would be the January 3, 1816, baptism of Sara Shneider, daughter of John and Elizabeth Reinhard Shneider. This date might be within the timeframe before Nicholas and his family moved away from Adams County, so I was hoping to find something when I read the sponsors' names, but no luck here. The godparents named were John and Apolonia Becher.

Looking again at the godparents' names for Nicholas' own children yielded no clues, either. After these few attempts, I began wishing for the same search capabilities as I've found for the Irish baptismal records I've used in researching my father-in-law's roots. There, it was possible to search for godparents' names as well as the child's name or the parents' names. I'd be curious to see if Nicholas and his wife Anna Elizabeth had been named as godparents for anyone else in the Conewago Chapel records, if for nothing else than to build their F.A.N. Club listings.

Tomorrow will be one more chance to find Nicholas Snider in early records during his first days after arriving in this country from Germany. Whether I can find an actual document containing his name in passenger records, I'm not sure. But we'll give it one more try before we wrap up and move along. 

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

 

You just have to be careful if you are building a family tree of people who lived in places like Perry County, Ohio. That's where my mother-in-law grew up, a place where high school students had best produce their family pedigree if the first date night went well—friends could unknowingly be cousins.

Thus, when I rewind my mother-in-law's family tree to the generations before her time, I end up adding spouses who, whoops, turned out to be cousins of some sort. Time to merge identities on that family tree—I already have that spouse's parents listed in a different branch of the family tree.

So it's no surprise, in doing my biweekly count today, to see I hadn't advanced quite as much as I thought I'd have gone, in adding Snider DNA matches to my mother-in-law's tree. It had felt like I had added so many more individuals—until I realized how many identities I had merged. Those branches on the family tree are indeed twisting and turning.

Still, I've added 519 more individuals to my mother-in-law's tree, mainly by verifying the Snider DNA matches I've been working on this month. And that number is certainly plenty for two weeks of work. Her tree now includes 38,371 individuals.

Since this month's research goal for my Twelve Most Wanted was to focus on the family of her second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider, the bulk of the work has been on connecting the 265 DNA matches listed on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool for this ancestor. It's been a slow slog. But that also precludes any progress on my own family tree, which is holding steady at 40,223 people. It won't be until the mid-autumn when I'll return to working on that tree. I anticipate that my in-laws' tree will bypass that number easily before October gets here.

In the next three days, I'll try to slam-dunk those additional Snider DNA matches, as well as review two historical documents in hopes of building a F.A.N. Club network for Nicholas Snider: passenger records for his supposed arrival from Germany in 1804, and church records from Conewago Chapel in Adams County, Pennsylvania, where some of his children were baptized. After those three brief days of working on this goal, it will be time to pack it up with a summary for the next time I work on this line—and then, move on to my research goal for May.

Happy Belated D N A Day

 

National DNA Day has come and gone, and I didn't even take the time to wish you a happy one this April 25. Some genetic genealogy companies chose to celebrate the occasion by offering sales through the weekend on their testing products. As for me and my house, we opted to celebrate by taking a walk on the beach. No reason in particular, though perhaps being close to the ocean has been bred into my genes. Oh, and my husband did wear a genetic genealogy T-shirt to breakfast at the hotel, a little gift from a long-past conference hosted in Houston by Family Tree DNA.

Right now, the fact that my husband's autosomal DNA test has yielded me over twenty thousand DNA matches to sort through and catalog, I confess I'm in need of a vacation. Granted, the only DNA matches who really count are those hovering around the fourth cousin mark or closer. For those, I struggle with only 1,420 matches—and not all of those are connected to my mother-in-law's lines.

Granted, the 265 DNA matches who are specific descendants of her second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider are the ones concerning me this month. And even though those matches are laid out clearly by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool—only fifty one more to go!—it can be a slog to run through each name and accurately document that match's relationship.

Now that I'm trying out Ancestry's Pro Tools, that ThruLines project is only the start. Next will be a thorough examination of the shared matches revealed by Pro Tools to see if there are any other clues to dig through on this family's hidden mysteries from generations back. Yet, with only four more days to go in this month, this appears to be a daunting project. And I still don't know much more about Nicholas Snider's roots than I did when I started this month.

There are some months when the selected project from my Twelve Most Wanted for the year reveal the answers I've been seeking. Other months, well, I have to make concluding notes and button up the task for another year's attempt at solving the mystery. Though it is clear that learning more about the local history of Adams County, Pennsylvania, may be enlightening, this may turn out to be a belated situation of more project than month in which to accomplish it.

Speaking of FAN Clubs . . .

 

It wasn't long after I had written, last Tuesday, about using F.A.N. Club research techniques to ferret out who, among Nicholas Snider's neighbors in Adams County, Pennsylvania, might have been fellow immigrants from Germany, when I received an offer I couldn't refuse. There on my screen was a banner posted from Ancestry.com, offering one month's free trial to their Pro Tools. Could I use that to help pursue my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor and his F.A.N. Club? You betcha.

Granted, I had long thought about springing for Ancestry.com's Pro Tools. I had first heard about their Pro Tools development from DNA researchers, who mainly focused on Ancestry's "Enhanced Shared Matches" mainly because it provides a research boost similar to the tools we once had at 23andMe before their security woes initiated their long spiral downwards (at least from a user's perspective).

But listening to fellow genealogical society members who at the first had sprung for the additional subscription cost at Ancestry gave me pause. Some felt the tree checker and accuracy ratings were more stress-inducing than helpful. The bottom line was something like this one friend's sentiment: "Well, I'll try it out for a while, just to see what it's like, but then cancel the subscription." For me, that equated to a wait and see message.

Granted, the boost to DNA matching is a big plus. I can see how some of those multiple dozens of DNA cousins who never made the cut to ThruLines recognition could still be pencilled in to my trees, simply by examining shared matches' strength of relationship to key known relatives among my DNA cousins. My half-brother's daughter, for instance, makes an automatic connector to my paternal line, as does my mother's cousin to my maternal grandmother's line, leading to clues I otherwise would not have, since Pro Tools offers a way to see shared matches and determine how closely they might be related, not only to me, but to each other.

But it is not only DNA for which that new Ancestry tool set catches my research imagination. Their Pro Tools include a network creation option. Granted, that option is still in a beta phase, so it might not be available to every subscriber who opts for the additional cost of Ancestry Pro Tools. But here's what I see, specifically pertinent to this month's research project, finding family connections for my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider. I want to know: for the brief time his family lived in Adams County, Pennsylvania, after arriving from Germany, did he live with relatives? Did he travel with a F.A.N. Club or cluster of people known to him from life in his native Germany?

I've been exploring possible connections to the other Snyders listed in Adams County for the one census in which Nicholas appeared: the 1810 census. Now that I'm using Pro Tools, Ancestry.com has made a provision for just that: a work space for creating networks of neighbors or associates who might not turn out to be family.

In other words, I now have a genealogical sandbox to play in as I dabble with the neighborly connections Nicholas Snider and his wife and children may have made during the decade in which they stopped in Pennsylvania before moving on to their final dwelling place in Perry County, Ohio. I've already created one network which I've labeled Snyders at Conewago Chapel, the church where some of Nicholas' children were baptized. And I'll use that network sandbox once again to explore Snyder listings throughout that 1810 census for all of Adams County, not just the Mount Pleasant location where Nicholas was enumerated.

Starting this week, I'll have a month to decide whether it's yay or nay for Ancestry.com's Pro Tools. And I have less than a week remaining to work on this Twelve Most Wanted project for April, so it's really time to get busy and see whether Pro Tools can give me the boost I need to build out Nicholas Snider's F.A.N. Club network.   

Assembling Shards of Identity

Imagine, for a moment, participating in an archaeological dig and finding a sliver of pottery. Though its broken edges are rough, one side seems smooth, and even bears the faint outline of a design. Could this be part of something bigger? Sifting through the surrounding rubble, you try to find a similar piece. 

Eventually, several such pieces get revealed through the silt of ages. It's time to gently brush them off and examine them closer. Could they fit together?

That, sometimes, is how I feel about the process of viewing the minuscule segments of matching genetic material, brought to light only when two people--unknowingly, distant relatives--coincidentally purchase a test at the same DNA company. Somehow, unseen hands know how to brush off the extraneous genetic layers added through generations, to focus on the details revealing our specific familial connection.

Equally invisible processes sift through countless family trees to spot a run of two or three names here, a connection to the next generation there, to piece together a pedigree chart connecting distant cousins. Get one step of the pathway wrong and the sign leading the way now leads astray. Run into a forest of family trees which unanimously stop at that same brick wall ancestor, and the way pointers no longer speak to us.

That's how I've been feeling, lately, about pursuing Nicholas Snider's roots. Yes, he showed up in Pennsylvania from—supposedly—Germany, but it's almost as if he had landed in Adams County by being dropped there by space aliens. As I sift through tokens of his identity, I feel as if I've been grasping for shards from an archaeological dig, unsure whether I'd find anything—and even if I did find something, unsure of what, exactly, it means. No search tool like Ancestry's ThruLines or MyHeritage's Theory of Family Relativity is pointing the way, because no way has yet been proposed, much less proven.

This is when we move into an experimental role. Granted, I'll still be examining all those DNA matches—eighteen more to go on Peter Snider's forty descendants who match my husband, then twenty two matches for Nicholas Snider's youngest son Conrad—but taking my cue from archaeologists sifting through the layers of time, I've got to broaden my search parameters. And welcome even the slightest shard I find. After all, it might turn out to be just the clue I've needed.

Concerning Conrad

 

There was something compelling about discovering that name, Conrad Snyder. Sure, that was a man who lived in the same county in Pennsylvania as my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider—and it wasn't lost on me that Nicholas had named a son of his own by that same given name. But trying to flesh out more of the elder Conrad's story from an 1810 census just wasn't yielding enough information.

After all, the age brackets used for those early American enumerations could sometimes be a bit too generous. If you think that giving the age of a son as "under ten years" can be befuddling, let's just say it  doesn't help to pin an identity on the head of a large household by simply saying he was forty five or older. 

Older? How much older?

The Conrad Snyder I found in Adams County, Pennsylvania—living in the same township where Nicholas once lived—could have been forty five. Or forty six. Or fifty six. Or much older.

I did the math. Even if Conrad had been forty five at the time of the 1810 census, that would have meant a birth year of 1765. Every year older than that would push that date of birth earlier. Hmmm. Doing a bit more math, I realized the man's age could have had him hovering around a serviceable age for a significant date in American history: the American Revolutionary War.

Could this Conrad have been of a right age to have served in the war? I popped over to the website of the Daughters of the American Revolution to check. Sure enough, there were three Patriots listed in their files with that name—and all three of them served from Pennsylvania.

The first entry, a man who served as a captain in the army, was for someone born in Germany, a promising sign—until I realized he died by 1802. No appearance in the 1810 census for him.

The second entry—also a man who was born in Germany—brought back memories of the family story we had found earlier this month about Nicholas supposedly serving as a drummer boy during the war. Could this actually have been a story about a relative of Nicholas, mistakenly borrowed and ascribed to Nicholas, himself? After all, here was a man named Conrad Snyder, who had that same scenario ascribed to him. I was tempted to revisit that story we had run across.

But the third DAR entry seemed the most similar to what I had seen in the census entry—yet frustratingly an entry not quite cooperating with the scenario I had assumed would have been Nicholas' own story. Here was a man born about the same time as Nicholas—handy, for the possibility that this Conrad and Nicholas could have been brothers—and dying in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

That's where the similarities stopped short. This Conrad was said to have been born in Pennsylvania, not Germany. Worse, there may even be problems with his service record, providing us with less information on his biography than I would have hoped. About the only helpful detail on that man's DAR entry was that it provided the date of his death in Adams County—March 25, 1837.

Now having a date of death for this Conrad, it might be possible to examine his will—if he had one—to see what we can learn about his family constellation. While this research path may turn out to be a rabbit trail, at least it will be one we can set aside, knowing we have done what we could to examine the possibilities.  

Family and/or Neighbors

 

One way to pinpoint a mystery ancestor's place in the family line—especially immigrant ancestors—is to look for the "F.A.N. Club" that traveled with him. In the case of Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, the first place where I can find any possible family, associates, or traveling neighbors after his arrival in America would be in Adams County, Pennsylvania. 

Specifically, Nicholas Snider and his family lived there from the early 1800s through some time before 1820, when the Sniders appeared in the census for Perry County, Ohio.

So who else lived in Adams County in 1810 who might have had the same Snider surname? In the case of that particular census, all heads of household with that surname had it spelled Snyder for that enumeration, but I made note of all with that surname who lived in the same township as our Nicholas: Mount Pleasant Township.

There were actually two households claiming that surname besides Nicholas. One, appearing to be a young family, was headed up by someone named John Snyder—a generic name which doesn't reveal much of anything. The other household, however, looks a bit more promising.

That household was headed by someone named Conrad Snyder. I lit up as soon as I considered that prospect, because at the end of the long list of names bestowed on Nicholas' many sons was that same name: Conrad. 

This Conrad, listed in the 1810 census for Adams County, seemed to be an older man with a large family. Included in the enumeration were two sons under ten years of age, another one between the ages of ten and fifteen, and two more between the ages of sixteen and twenty five. Conrad, himself, was categorized as forty five years of age or older, and was joined by a slightly younger wife and seven daughters—in all, a household of fourteen people.

Well? Could Conrad have been Nicholas Snider's father? This is not clear. At age forty five or older, Conrad would have been born in 1765 or earlier. Nicholas himself was born about that same time—1766, according to some notes, though I've yet to find any verification. However, when we found Nicholas in the 1810 census, he had a far younger family than Conrad appeared to have at that time. Since the 1810 census doesn't specify ages above forty five, we can't really be sure whether this was a father-son or sibling relationship without further information.

It's Still a Tapestry

 

Sometimes I forget how interwoven a family tree can get—until I return to work on my mother-in-law's family. Then I'm reminded that hers is not a pedigree chart—it's a tapestry. Those strands get woven together, over and over.

This past weekend, I was reminded once again that this family is still a tapestry. Working on the descendants of Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather (well, depending on how you calculate it), I ran into a name which seemed vaguely familiar.

Make that déjà vu familiar. I'd seen that name before. Sure enough, checking the index for names already entered into her family tree, there were two entries for that same name, complete with matching details. Time to merge duplicates. 

No, make that times two. Soon, there were even more. Some duplicates had their roots two or more generations back. Who knew that the family line I built out a few years ago would develop loose ends that didn't find their family match until now?

And so, I weave in another branch of the family—or, more correctly, weave it back in, once again, to an unexpected place in the ever-bushier tree. With pedigree collapse, you come to expect that issue will pop up—once or twice. But with this "endogamy lite" tree, it is smart policy to keep checking for duplicates. After all, I can't be expected to remember everything about a family tree approaching forty thousand names.

This brings up a policy question. For such a situation, when I enter DNA matches by their specific relationships, such as can be done at Ancestry.com, which of two or more relationships do I note? At first, I tried listing both relationship pathways for DNA matches, but had given up when the process became tedious. However, if anyone is using such data to help hone DNA predictions for future use, my input might skew any conclusions drawn from my entries.

So many of the strands in this ever-growing tree can be tied into the bigger picture in more ways than one. I'm not sure why I find that humorous, but I do. This tree does not lack for unexpected connections.

With the break over the weekend for the Easter holiday now past, it will be back to work on Nicholas Snider's descendants to map out the DNA connections—the behind-the-scenes grunt work that embodies the entertainment value of watching sausages being made. But it is time to get back to exploring those old documents from his time period to see if I can pinpoint any other Snider relatives—or at least members of his "F.A.N. Club" who made the journey with him from his home back in Germany. Somebody out there has got to have a connection noted to our founding immigrant Nicholas Snider.

A Pause to Reflect

 

Today is Easter—even in the Greek Orthodox tradition, an unusual coinciding of western and eastern Christian calendars. I always welcome this day as a pause to reflect on what is most meaningful to me. Whether you call it Resurrection Day or simply celebrate it as a chance to enjoy spring weather outdoors, I hope you are able to enjoy some meaningful time with family.

In 1904, The Tacoma Times published this repeating icon of bells and lilies across the front page of their April 2 edition of the newspaper to commemorate Easter. The artwork is preserved via Wikimedia from the digital copy of the newspaper edition at the U.S. Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection. In the public domain.

It's Easy — After all the Hard Work is Done

 

There is no doubt that preparation makes a job flow much more smoothly. If I had any doubt that planning and preparation had any place in working through the thousands of DNA matches I've received, I'm a firm believer now. Building out a "bushy" family tree, including collateral lines—and all their descendants—may have been a lot of work, but it paved the way so I wouldn't get swamped with all the matches that piled up in my family's accounts over the last twelve years.

Right now, as I work my way through the ThruLines list of the forty—no, make that thirty eight as of today—DNA matches descending from Nicholas Snider's son Peter, I'm finding it to be a smooth process if I had already attached that line of descendants to my mother-in-law's tree. See? It's easy, at least after all the hard work has been done.

There are other descendants of Peter Snider whom I had missed the first time I did the preparation work on this tree. That meant, of course, that I had to stop and hunt for documents to verify the assertion being made by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. After all, a mistake repeated in hundreds of family trees would still be a mistake, so I don't just want to copy what everyone else had said, even though ThruLines picked it up, too. I want to see some verification that the connection is so.

Yes, it all adds up to hard work, but that is an investment in time well worth the effort. Now, when I receive a new DNA match, especially one outlined on Ancestry's ThruLines or at MyHeritage's Theory of Family Relativity, I've already got the basic structure laid in place, and can just follow the map the genealogy company has outlined for me.

The whole point behind using DNA for genealogy is not just to build a bushy tree, of course. It's to help us figure out a way around those brick wall ancestors who have us stumped. I've already seen that while working on other lines in our family, and I'm hoping that will stand me in good stead for this pursuit of Nicholas Snider's roots. He was my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather. While I am testing her son's DNA for these purposes, a third great-grandfather's descendants are still somewhat within reach to hopefully glean helpful information about the Snider roots. More than halfway through the process of examining all these Snider DNA matches, we should have the verdict on this project soon.

Top Down and Bottom Up

 

Many descendants from one ancestral couple can lead to duplicate entries in the family tree if you keep at it long enough. In the case of Nicholas and Anna Elizabeth Snider, whose many sons' grandchildren ended up marrying their distant cousins, some pedigree collapse may have blindsided me.

Working a family tree from the founding ancestor forward for DNA purposes, rather than the usual tree-building approach of starting with oneself and moving backwards through the generations, can result in duplicate entries. Ask me; I know.

I've always known that my mother-in-law's family tree had many intermarriages. As far as I've been able to trace her roots—back to immigrants arriving in the American colonies, in some instances—I've been able to spot such instances. In one particular case, for which I rib my husband that he's his own seventh cousin, a Gordon ancestor ended up marrying three times, two of which marriages produced multiple children. Fast forward a few more generations and move to a different state, and subsequent romances blossom unwittingly into marriages between third cousins. Who knew?

A genealogist knows, of course. And now that my focus has turned to the descendants of Nicholas Snider, I'm seeing this pattern repeated. While I work my mother-in-law's tree traditionally—back from her generation to her parents, then grandparents—I add siblings, then follow those collateral lines back down to the present time. Along the way, the children of those collateral lines marry—but I don't know who the spouse is, except to note the name and perhaps a date of birth, or maybe even the parents' names.

Along comes a Snider DNA match, and ThruLines paints the way from founding immigrant Nicholas Snider to the current generation. I trace the pathway, recording each step of the way and linking the documents to the family tree. And bingo! There pops up a notice on my Ancestry.com tree that I've already entered that document for another someone who, strangely, has the same name. Checking it out, sure enough, it turns out to be a duplicate entry. On this tree, I've come both ways—down from the past and upwards from the present—and meet in the middle with two names which represent one person. Instant downsizing of the family tree.

It's always nice to learn the rest of the story on a family's line, of course—not to mention, see this bushy tree get modestly pruned. Best of all is to link those DNA matches to their proper place in the family tree. But somehow, I just wish I had spotted a clear path, from beginning to end, sooner. I guess it takes all kinds of input to shape up an accurate picture of the extended family—top down and bottom up.

Simon's Sixty Done

 

Some goals may seem do-able, while others seem to keep us running as fast as we can. Today's goal was one of the latter: I wanted to complete the review of the sixty DNA matches linked to the descendants of Nicholas Snider's son Simon.

Reviewing those sixty matches brought up some thoughts. The prime observation had to do with pedigree collapse. In my mother-in-law's case—and this exercise is solely because of her history in Perry County, Ohio—her roots were quite tangled. I know the proper term for that might be pedigree collapse—think cousin marrying cousin, for instance—but in her case, I prefer to call it "endogamy lite." 

In the case of some of these Snider DNA matches, they are cousins several times over. Some of them were related to my mother-in-law's line through five or six different surnames from her past. That's just what happens when a small community stays in one place for two hundred years.

The purpose of reviewing these Snider DNA matches involved not only the process of linking each DNA match to my mother-in-law's tree, but updating each relative's profile page with links to documents. Some of these people, for instance, had been added to the family tree long before the 1950 census had been released, so an update was necessary. Then, too, marriage announcements in newspapers and other records found during this process allowed me to make many more profiles in my mother-in-law's family tree current.

With that goal completed, it's simply on to the next goal. While I've already added all the DNA matches for Nicholas' children Jacob, Lewis, Joseph, Maria, and Simon, there are three more categories of Snider DNA matches yet to conquer. The good news is that the remaining number of Snider matches is seventy seven—a far less daunting number than the 268 that appeared on my ThruLines readout when I first began this process.

With that, I'll move on to the DNA matches linked to Nicholas' son Peter tomorrow—a mere forty matches after all that's been done so far. 

To See it With my Own Eyes

 

What is it about documents for family history? Somehow, I can't just accept that someone else saw it, or transcribed it, or referenced it. I need to see the thing for myself. And that is simply not happening for Nicholas Snider, the second great-grandfather I'm seeking on my mother-in-law's family tree.

Granted, the man was likely born in in the mid-1760s and made his trip from Germany to a very young United States of America in the early 1800s when record-keeping was not our nation's bureaucratic strong suit. Whatever records might have survived—if even required to be taken, much less kept for centuries—would certainly not be of a format we'd expect today.

Though I had already read reports, thanks to Ancestry.com, that Nicholas had arrived in 1804 on the ship Fortune, I wanted to see the actual passenger list. So naturally, I was excited to learn that there was a digitized collection at FamilySearch.org called Pennsylvania Landing Reports of Aliens, 1798-1828. I was not so delighted to learn the collection—all 636 images—is not searchable. But you can browse.

From the transcription, I noticed that the Nicholas in that ship's entry had traveled with Anna, presumably his wife, and a five year old son named Jacob. Their surname was spelled Schneider, no surprise for a family traveling from Germany, although our Nicholas' family eventually went by the more English spelling, Snider or Snyder. Along with Nicholas' entry in the passenger record were entries for two unnamed children, aged three and one, who were marked as dead.

But were these the entries for the right Nicholas Schneider family? That was my impetus for finding the original record, in case any other information might have been provided. In addition, slight changes to details I had found—such as Nicholas' wife's name being Anna Elizabeth, which doesn't fit a middle initial "M" from the transcription—urge me to find more information.

Whether I have the fortitude to last through all 636 images in the collection, I can't yet say. I suspect, given the size, I'll find a spot which is safely within the date range of that 1804 transcription, and go page by page through that section. And hope. The FamilySearch wiki entry for the collection doesn't give much more guidance; sometimes you just have to turn the pages for yourself.

Searching Through Adams County Records

 

Tracing Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, as we go backwards in time can be a trying proposition. We've already discovered other men by that name in the early 1800s around the vicinity of Pennsylvania, so spotting that Snider name—or its variant spellings—in Adams County doesn't necessarily mean I've found the right man. Until I'm prepared to zero in on the right candidate, it seems a wise approach would be to glean more background information on not just the man, but the history—and historical resources—of the region during the time when I spotted him there: the 1810 census.

Since Nicholas' descendants, once they moved westward to Perry County, Ohio, were connected to the local Catholic Church there, it seems reasonable that they would have attended the same religious body while living in their previous home in Pennsylvania. Indeed, there was a Catholic church established in Adams County, known as the Conewago Chapel. And thanks to some notes at the FamilySearch wiki for available church records in Adams County, Pennsylvania, we can see those records reach back to 1790.

Besides baptismal records, though, I was curious to see what other ways I could track Nicholas Snider during his stay in Adams County. The good news for this, according to the FamilySearch wiki for Adams County, is that court records and land records date back to 1800. Added bonus: no courthouse fires to spoil my fun!

While attaining records from 1800 may not seem like much of a bonus, given my research goal of finding Nicholas Snider's origin and having found his appearance in the 1810 census already, I am fairly certain all I will need to work on would be that ten year span of time. Reason I'm sure: later census records indicate Nicholas' oldest son Jacob was born in Germany about 1799. All surviving children after that point were said to have been born in either Pennsylvania or Maryland before the family's arrival in Ohio.

For those ten years, possible searches could be made of land records in Adams County, which thankfully are available to view at FamilySearch from 1800 onward. In addition, I'll be searching for tax records attached to Nicholas Snider's residence there. But the main discovery of resources I'll be interested in is the collection at FamilySearch called "Landing Reports of Aliens, 1798-1828." No title could have fit my search parameters more closely. 

Recorded Signs of Existence

 

As we enter another season of religious holidays—both Passover and Easter—my mind turns in gratefulness to the records such religious institutions have provided us. As I chase after any signs of the existence of Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather from the early 1800s, I realize I wouldn't even have what little I do know about him, if it weren't for the record keeping mandates of such organizations. 

I think also, unfortunately, of how much doubt I have that I've located the right Nicholas Snider in those baptismal records back in Adams County, Pennsylvania, before that German immigrant moved his family to Perry County, Ohio. Unlike the pristine handwriting preserved in some of the Catholic baptismal records I've checked for relatives back in their European homeland, the records from Conewago Chapel look like the handwritten scrawl one might expect from a cleric serving on the frontier—hurried, and not quite sure about whether, at a moment's notice, he and his little flock might have to flee for safety.

I think also about the little quirks I spot as I try to find each of Nicholas' children recorded in the church records at their birthplace. In 1812, for instance, Nicholas' wife was the only parent mentioned for the baptism of their daughter Maria Augusta. Where was Nicholas? And what was the meaning of the parenthetical note, "a catholica" after Elizabeth's name? I am not sure whether inspecting these oddities would lead me to clues, then answers, to the larger question of who, exactly, this Nicholas Snider actually was, and where he came from before landing in Pennsylvania. For all I know, they could be false leads, leading, well, nowhere.

A bit more information on what records in Adams County are still available from that time period would be helpful. It's time to broaden the search away from Nicholas, the individual, to examine who made up his community, and where they traveled to arrive at that settlement.

Goals Met —> Results Gained

 

If meeting goals means gaining results, how did my research goal for this month's DNA matches turn out? Since this is the time for my biweekly count, I have the answer: my mother-in-law's tree gained a lot.

Face it: connecting those DNA cousins to a family tree means verifying their position in the family. And that's not just by taking a lab's word for the connection. I need to know how these matches connect to the family tree. That requires collaboration by documents. Adding DNA matches to the collateral lines in a family tree can really make that tree grow quite bushy.

Reviewing the seventy eight DNA matches who connect to my mother-in-law's family through Nicholas Snider's son Jacob was just the first hurdle. Now, with the exception of two ThruLines candidates whose suggested tree includes a name twin instead of the right ancestor, I've completed the second goal: to verify the twenty eight DNA cousins who descend from Nicholas' son Lewis.

All that work has added up to one fact: I wouldn't have gained 485 more individuals in my mother-in-law's tree in the past two weeks if it hadn't been for that goal. A lot of work, yes—it feels good to know the job is done—but a significant addition to the family tree that might not have happened without the guidance of DNA testing and the tools available at the testing sites I've used.

My mother-in-law's tree now stands at 37,852 individuals, all documented by multiple records connecting them to the family. But even though my focus this month has shifted to my mother-in-law's family, don't think my own tree has languished in the meantime. Since I needed to close out the previous month's project, I did manage to add another seventeen individuals to my own tree from that project. That tree now includes 40,223 documented people. Until I return to working on my family's tree with my Twelve Most Wanted goals for the last three months of the year, I suspect that tree will not grow much more over the summer.

Gaining nearly five hundred new entries in my mother-in-law's line in the past two weeks, though, is a massive research pace. I doubt I'll keep going at that same rate, although I do have 155 more Snider DNA matches to review this month. We'll check on progress in another two weeks—and then, it will be high time for a well-deserved break.

Reaching Goals: Step by Step with Fortitude

 

It is likely just as true for genealogy as for any other endeavor: you can get more accomplished if you set research goals for yourself. The caveat, of course, is that you actually do the work you've set out for yourself.

In the case of my process of selecting my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to research for the year, each monthly focus has sub-categories. One of those categories is to review, update, and catalogue my DNA matches for that specific ancestor. This may all seem elementary and routine—after all, you can't accomplish a goal without tackling it step by step—but there is another component I've lately discovered is also needed in this process: fortitude.

Take this month's research focus: my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider. While a second great-grandfather may not seem that far removed from our own generation—I actually know some people who have lived to see their own second great-grandchildren—in my mother-in-law's case, her family's generations were long. By that, I mean there was a lot of time elapsed between generations, especially when it came to those Catholic families with many children. A youngest child of a youngest child could mean generations that were separated by forty years or more.

Bottom line for all that: Nicholas Snider had a lot of descendants to trace. And there were quite a few of them in the past decade who have become fascinated with DNA testing. To put some numbers on this detail, my DNA test for this line—provided courtesy of my husband for his mother—currently has 261 matches tied to Nicholas Snider's line.

Let's step back to that research goal for this month: Nicholas Snider. If part of that goal is to verify all those DNA matches, I've got a lot of work ahead of me. Granted, part of the step-by-step process for the past ten years has been to research each of the descendants of this ancestral founding immigrant, Nicholas Snider. There are a lot of names—plus documentation to verify—already in place in my mother-in-law's tree, thanks to that decade-long, step by step process. But that is just the foundational work. Next is the process of going through each match listed on Thru-Lines (for those Ancestry DNA matches), to verify their connection to this most recent common ancestor.

My genealogy happy dance for this weekend is that I completed the review of all DNA matches who link to Nicholas' eldest son, Jacob. When I started this project at the beginning of April, that meant reviewing eighty DNA matches—but something happened along the way: the number of DNA matches inexplicably reduced by one, then by another, leaving the count for my task now at seventy eight matches to verify.

Still, that's seventy eight people with records to verify. Yet, step by step, I got through the process. True, there were five I simply couldn't verify. That may be due to insufficient access to records—some states' records are more available online than others—but it could also be owing to mistakes in the match's own tree. I did spot a couple matches for whom documentation didn't seem to support the trees from which ThruLines draws its information.

One helpful tactic I tried this month was to start work on this DNA match list from the bottom rather than from the top. I had always done so from the top in the past, but I was concerned that I would run out of steam before finishing—and besides, I would simply be repeating the process if I started from the top once again. So I reversed engines and headed to the bottom of the pile this time.

Another approach was to keep a separate list of each match I completed, to ensure I hadn't skipped any—and, as I realized was also important, to note each "match" for whom I couldn't supply documentation or find verifiable connections.

Once at the top of the list, having completed the process for each descendant of Jacob Snider, it was time to move on to the next son of Nicholas Snider—but which one? I toyed with the idea of moving to the next largest grouping—that would be the descendants of Simon Snider, for whom I'll need to tackle sixty DNA matches—but decided on a different approach. Rather than jump around on the readout—not to mention, deal with another daunting number—I opted to simply go down the list as it was provided by ThruLines. 

With that, my next grouping to work on is the twenty eight DNA matches linked to Nicholas' son Lewis. Twenty eight seems like such a breeze after eighty, giving me a psychological lift from the grind of the last series. But strangely enough, working on this different set of descendants brings its own "flavor." I've already spotted two ThruLines charts which simply can't be possible. One was a case of confusing two different men with the same first name but differing middle names; the other will require building out the proposed match's own tree, as ThruLines connected that tree with an ancestral woman for whom I can find no marriage record.

Despite the different problems I'm encountering with this second ancestral line, I've already completed eight of the twenty eight listed DNA matches for Lewis Snider's line. And the next son of Nicholas after that will be Aloysius Joseph Snider, who represents only four DNA matches. Each segment completed brings me step by step closer to finishing this research goal. Though I had my doubts at the beginning of the month that I would completely tackle this pile of 261 DNA matches, getting over that first hurdle of nearly eighty matches was certainly an encouragement.

The Snider Will

 

Sometimes, just looking at the details of an ancestor's will can help connect the dots between the current generation of the decedent's offspring and relatives belonging to earlier generations. It is not so much a case of looking at the names of those who will inherit parts of their father's estate, but a matter of examining the connection with witnesses—and sometimes executors—named on the document.

In Nicholas Snider's case, he drew up his will in Perry County, Ohio, and signed it on April 17, 1854. Best I can tell, he died just shy of one year later. His will was presented in court on April 27, 1855. In the brief document, his son Conrad was named first, being the son with whom Nicholas had been living at the time of his death—or at least at the most recent census. Also mentioned in the will were Nicholas' unmarried daughter Catherine as well as his married daughter "Mary" (baptized Maria Augusta), along with several sons.

Looking at the names listed in the will for Nicholas' sons, I can find Jacob, the eldest, then Joseph (being Aloysius Joseph, as the first son by that name was said to have died at sea), and Lewis. Simon was named as executor, but there were no bequests made in the document for him. There was no mention of either Peter or Andrew, Nicholas Snider's two remaining sons, though Peter was certainly alive at the time, being mentioned as a son of Nicholas in a 1902 book, A Biographical Record of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio.

It was the others named in the will that had me wondering, though. In drawing up a will, it was not uncommon to see a close family member of the father's generation called upon to ensure that the provision of the will be attended to faithfully. Sometimes, such a person might be the widow's brother, for instance, but in other cases, a trusted business partner might be called upon.

In the case of Nicholas Snider, he chose one of his sons to serve as executor. For the witnesses to his will, he asked two men to sign: John Lidey and David Church. Both of those names stump me. I am fairly certain neither of them were connected to Nicholas' wife's family—and at any rate, she had already died, so there was no need to protect her interests in her widowhood. 

The question still comes up in my mind, though: when Nicholas moved his family from Pennsylvania—even by way of Maryland—was there no one from among his own family to make the long trip to Ohio with him? I'm still looking for familiar surnames, but records on this end of his life are too far removed from the time period when any other family members might still be alive. Perhaps returning to those earliest census records might help spot possible connections in either 1810 back in Adams County, Pennsylvania, or 1820 after the family removed to Perry County, Ohio.

Meanwhile, Looking Ahead . . .

 

What happens when eight children of eight siblings go on to have multiple children of their own—and those are just the grandparents of the current generation? That's what has got me wrapped up this week: connecting the DNA matches of Nicholas Snider's descendants to the right places in my mother-in-law's family tree. 

It hasn't been a smooth ride. And looking ahead, I see many more hours of work before I even get close to finishing out the nearly eighty DNA matches for just Nicholas Snider's oldest son Jacob.

While I realize that looking ahead won't necessarily produce information on the founding immigrant ancestor's origin, I keep hoping these strands of DNA will lead to a family line which did preserve some of the oldest stories. A family Bible, perhaps, or an heirloom passed down from the passage from Germany—or wherever it was that Nicholas and Elizabeth originated.

True, some of the shared stories can turn out to be family myths. We've already seen that with one great-grandson's biography. Out of the thirty six DNA matches I've reviewed so far from son Jacob's line, no one else has come up with any stories—but I'm less that halfway done with just that eldest son. But if any descendants would yield the hoped-for stories, it would likely be either that eldest son's family, or perhaps the lone daughter who did marry and have children.

The task is admittedly tiresome. It involves not just laying down links to DNA matches in the family tree, but verifying connections by attaching records—not just one record, but whole series of records, such as each decennial census record. Work on some family lines turns out to proceed smoothly, but other lines hit snarls and tangles with unexpected deaths, trauma, and tragedies. You get a sense of a family's wellbeing, just going through the brief documentary overview of each member's life. I may not know where Nicholas Snider came from, but I'm getting a clearer sense of where his family headed to over the ensuing generations.

While Nicholas spent a few years of his life living in Pennsylvania and eventually settling in Ohio, where my mother-in-law's family remained, I am now following subsequent branches of Nicholas' son Jacob's descendants who saw fit to migrate further to Iowa, and ultimately to Minnesota. Some, even, continued the move westward to arrive in California, not far from where I live now. To think that third and fourth cousins live within a commute drive of our home here—while sharing roots that reach back to Ohio and Pennsylvania almost two hundred years ago—does boggle the mind. Those winding migration pathways possess a fascinating pull of their own. 

Revisiting Old Resources

 

When stuck on brick wall ancestors, sometimes I find it helpful to revisit old resources to see if perhaps I had missed a detail from the record the first time around. This month, I'm focusing on one particular brick wall ancestor: my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider. Since nothing from his records in Perry County, Ohio—this German immigrant's final home—helped me trace his origin, perhaps documents from his previous home in Pennsylvania might be worth a second examination. For that, we need to direct our attention to Adams County, Pennsylvania. 

If Nicholas Snider came to Ohio from Pennsylvania, what makes me so sure he came from Adams County? It is thanks to one particular record set that I find indications of this possible stopping point: the baptismal records preserved from a Catholic Church known as Conewago Chapel. Officially called the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the church was built in the mid-1780s.

Fortunately for our purposes, transcriptions of the baptismal records from Conewago Chapel preserve some of the information I'm seeking. In addition, thanks to the work of institutions like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and their partnership with Ancestry.com, I not only have a searchable resource which includes the digitized version of the actual Conewago Chapel baptism entries, but an index by county of all Pennsylvania churches included in Ancestry's collection, "Pennsylvania and New Jersey, U.S., Church and Town Records, 1669-2013."

 Thus, I can find the record for Aloysius Josephus "Shnider" who was baptized there on March 25, 1810, and for his sister Maria Augusta "Schneider" on June 20, 1812. I've noted each child's sponsors—for Joseph it was Joseph and Mary Hildebrand, and for Maria, Catherine Gibbons—in case those surnames become important clues in the future to possible family connections.

As for the Adams County connection for the Snider family, I want to dig deeper, in case I can find other records which might reveal further details on Nicholas and where he originated. After all, though we have the family listed in the 1810 census there, reaching back another decade leads me...nowhere at this point.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

 

It began with a hint from Ancestry.com for my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider. Whether he actually spelled his surname that way—or Schneider, or Snyder, both of which I've also seen in records—I can't tell. But sometime during the year of his death, according to this hint, his heirs appeared in court to make a claim based on his Revolutionary War service.

Keeping in mind the Revolutionary War story I had already encountered from the biographical sketch of another descendant of Nicholas, I was all eyes to read the faded and blurry text of this handwritten court entry. Who wouldn't have appreciated a hint like that?!

Taking a first glance at the documents, I spotted some details which agreed with what I already knew about this ancestor: that by the 1855 date of that document, Nicholas was already deceased, as was his wife. Encouragingly, his wife's name on the court record was listed as Elizabeth—a detail which didn't initially disturb me, for the 1850 census had entered her name that same way, despite her full given name being Anna Elizabeth.

Even the son named as heir in this record, who was bringing his petition to court that day, was Jacob, same as our Nicholas Snider's eldest son. That, however, was where the similarities ended.

I've learned long ago that, despite the ease of genealogy websites' habit of providing the breadcrumbs of "hints" to guide us along our research path, one must always—repeat after me, "Always. Always. ALWAYS"—look at the document. With this instance, though, I'll provide an addendum: look at the entire document, not just the first few paragraphs. There are other families out there, believe it or not, who named their children the same names your own ancestors preferred.

I didn't need to read much further when I realized that having another son named Nicholas, while a likely choice for a father by that same name, was not in the records for our Nicholas. Yes, he had many sons—eight that I can find so far—but none of them became his father's namesake.

Furthermore, while our Nicholas did live in Pennsylvania at one point—the location where this petition was brought to court—he certainly didn't die there. As far as I can tell, of his sons who lived to adulthood, all traveled west with him to Perry County, Ohio.

So, the two sons of Nicholas and Elizabeth, who filed their complaint in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 1855? Though they claimed that their father was a soldier in the Revolutionary War, their father was certainly not our Nicholas Snider of Perry County, Ohio, even though he also once lived in Pennsylvania. 

How did that Ancestry hint find its way to my family tree? I suspect it's because several other Ancestry subscribers saw that same document and did the easy thing: click to add it to their tree without reading the thirty six pages of documentation appended to the case file inspecting the original pension claim.

Since I did take a look, I discovered a few interesting points. First discovery was that the Nicholas in question, who died in 1828, was neither of the Snyder Patriots listed in the DAR website. However, even in the packet of documents in the rejected pension file, it seemed that sometimes the applicant was confused with the DAR Patriot who died in 1786.

More to my current question was a letter in the pension packet written in 1916 to the Honorable Halvor Steenerson. At the time of the letter, Halvor Steenerson was a member of Congress representing Crookston in Polk County, Minnesota—the very place where Louis Edward Gossman of that 1897 biographical sketch which prompted this search also lived and worked. Apparently, at the time of the letter, Louis Gossman was then serving as judge.

The letter in response to the congressman's query on behalf of the judge confirmed the same details I had found by reading the entire pension packet: that the Nicholas whose rejected application was on file was a man who died in Pennsylvania in 1828. Apparently, by 1916 Judge Gossman had had second thoughts about that family tale as well, and was seeking some verification—long after, I might add, he had offered that family story for his published biographical sketch.

Just in case the Honorable Steenerson's status wasn't sufficient to round up some solid evidence, I did further reading on Revolutionary War pension applications and bounty land warrant records. A quick and easy index to applicants by state revealed no Nicholas Snyder mentioned from the state of Ohio—especially none from Perry County, home of our Nicholas Snider. But I suspect that even if the judge himself, a descendant of our Nicholas, came to seek verification of that family story in later years, perhaps it would serve us well to remember that old advice: don't believe everything you read—or hear. It may just be a family myth.

Plotting the Path to the Past

 

One way to connect our ancestors to their past is to literally trace the path they followed through life—but only on rewind. We need to plot that path backwards through time.

For my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas—whose surname in America eventually came to be spelled Snider—that means starting from the spot of his last days in Perry County, Ohio. We can see from the 1850 census—the last enumeration in which his name appeared—that he was a resident of Hopewell Township, one of the three northernmost townships in the county. He presumably had remained there ever since paying full price in 1820 for the southwest quarter of section twenty two of the land he and his son Jacob had acquired as tenants in common, thanks to the Harrison Land Act of 1800.

Before that, according to another one of those biographical sketches published over a century ago, Nicholas had arrived in Ohio from Pennsylvania, but apparently first by way of Maryland. This report I obtained from a book published in 1902, A Biographical Record of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio. The sketch was actually concerning Nicholas' grandson, William Snider, who was 

a son of Peter and Eleanor (Dean) Snider. His father was born in Maryland in 1816 and was a son of Nicholas Snider, who about 1818 removed from Maryland to Ohio, entering land from the government one mile north of Somerset, in Reading township.

But was this really true? Right away, we can see a conflict in reports again, having just viewed the census record identifying Nicholas' home as having been situated in Hopewell Township. Perhaps by that time, Nicholas' age had warranted his releasing the land to his son Jacob—or perhaps he had simply sold one property to purchase another. Land records can help resolve that discrepancy, but the bigger question is: where did Nicholas and his family live before arriving in Ohio?

To answer that question, we'd need to reach back to the 1810 census. One possible candidate might be the "Nicholass Snyder" whose family resided in Adams County, Pennsylvania. There, his household was composed of two sons under ten years of age and another one between the ages of ten and fifteen, along with a daughter under ten. These could easily be our Nicholas' eldest son Jacob, born in 1799, and younger brothers Joseph and Lewis, plus his oldest daughter Catherine. The ages given for the two adults in the household also fit Nicholas and his wife, Anna Elizabeth.

Could there have been a stop in Maryland before moving onward to Ohio? Very likely: Adams County in Pennsylvania bordered the state line with Maryland. The family could have sold their land in Pennsylvania too close to the date of Peter's birth, and decided on an interim stop in Maryland before heading to their intended destination.

The discovery of that 1810 census does pinpoint a location for Nicholas' family in Pennsylvania. While that seems to be helpful, it also dropped a pin on the Pennsylvania map which caused some conflict with another record I found for a Nicholas Snyder—this one in Cumberland County, just one county to the north of Adams County. We'll need to take some time to evaluate whether that was our Nicholas or not. 

After Forty Eight Hours: Up the Ante?

It may feel like I've been wandering around in circles, trying to poke my way through a document brick wall hiding the story of Nicholas Schneider, but behind the scenes, I've been trying a different approach: DNA testing. Though my mother-in-law is no longer here to help verify the cousin matches descending from her second great-grandfather Nicholas, you can be sure her son did test—and I've been carefully sifting through those many DNA cousins' family trees since the start of this month.

One encouraging sign was to see the 268 DNA matches shared on this line of descent. I was also jazzed to read that, at least at Ancestry DNA, if I make updates to the family tree, Ancestry will generally update their list of matches within forty eight hours. Well, it's been forty eight hours (at least) since I began updating this Schneider/Snider/Snyder line on my mother-in-law's tree. Any increase in DNA matches?

Any time I update my tree based on information gleaned from DNA matches, it's a two-step process requiring not just the addition of DNA matches to my tree, but of documentation to support each additional person. Of course, what ends up happening is not just the addition of that one person, but of that one's spouse—and the names of the spouse's parents—and members of the next generation, too. Just in the past five days, I've probably added over fifty new names to my mother-in-law's tree, just by going through those DNA matches.

Surely the addition of fifty new family members to the tree should result in something, shouldn't it? After all, those fifty new names are just from the twenty four descendants of Nicholas' son Jacob that I've managed to complete. But after forty eight hours, not only did I gain absolutely zero new matches, but I actually lost one. How could that be?

From time to time, I've noticed the count on DNA matches has shrunk. This could be for a variety of reasons. I'm guessing one might be that some DNA customers could have gotten nervous about all the negative DNA news out there—right now, it's the backlash over news about 23andMe, but in the past, it's been about the Golden State Killer and other reactions to current events involving DNA—and withdrawn their participation in viewing matches. Another way could have been that the customer's tree was taken private and unsearchable. Or perhaps someone discovered that, whoops, that wasn't my parent's ancestor after all, and made a total change to that family tree.

For right now, though, that means there is one less DNA match linked to Nicholas' son Jacob—moving in exactly the opposite direction from what I had anticipated. Perhaps I need to up the ante and double down on adding descendants to Nicholas' tree to see what might happen in the next forty eight hour period. After all, Nicholas Schneider left a pretty robust family after all these generations. There are plenty more to add to this line.   

Looking for Answers

The good thing about finding a relative in one of those old genealogy books is that we can always double-check the book's assertions. We have the tools for that now, unlike the limitations authors faced in those previous centuries, when all they had was wood-burning genealogy websites. When we're looking for answers to questions about brick wall ancestors, there's no need to shy away from publications from a previous age of genealogical research. It's okay; we can do this.

Thus, when I spotted a hundred-twenty-plus entry for a cousin on my mother-in-law's Snider line, there was no need to reject it out of hand. First, I could look up each of the assertions in the report. After all, the article spoke of Nicholas Schneider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather and the focus of this month's Twelve Most Wanted—and I did want to know something more about this founding immigrant on the Snider/Snyder side of her family.

The entry in question was a biographical sketch concerning Louis Edward Gossman in the 1897 book, Progressive Men of Minnesota. In that entry, we can find the assertion that Mr. Gossman's great-grandfather—called Nicholas Snyder—had come to America with a company of German immigrants in 1778, when he was just fourteen year of age. According to that narrative, Nicholas joined "Washington's army" in Pennsylvania as a drummer boy, and served for the remainder of the war, after which he returned—though only briefly—to Germany.

Well? Could that be so? That's when I started looking for those answers. The National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution happen to host an online resource for looking up such details, so my first stop was to hop on over to their website. One sticking point about such a search was the variety of spellings used for this family's surname—I've seen Schneider, Snider, and Snyder—so I made sure to search using each of those versions.

Result? Schneider yielded nothing. Trying Snider generated a message directing me to use an alternate spelling, which the website handily suggested: Snyder. And for that third attempt, I was rewarded with two possibilities, both from Pennsylvania.

The only problem was that neither man was of the correct age. One was born in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania—rather than my Nicholas' birth somewhere in Germany—and the age was a bit older than the Progressive Men narrative had suggested. The other possibility was a man born in Germany, but my hopes were dashed when I saw the year of birth: 1732. That Nicholas' date of death in 1786 was sure to nix the possibility entirely.

So much for the tale of Revolutionary War service for my Nicholas, at least if we are relying on currently confirmed records of service. But what about the fact that Nicholas Snider eventually obtained land in Ohio, where he settled with his growing family? Could he have received Bounty Land? Checking for General Land Office records at the Bureau of Land Management, I noticed that Nicholas obtained his 160 acre parcel not by service in the war, but by the authority of the Harrison Land Act of 1800.

The ground-breaking virtue of that legislation was that it opened up settlement in "western" territorial locations by allowing people to purchase land with a credit feature: one-fourth down, with the remainder to be paid over a four year period. A subsequent change in that arrangement in 1804 reduced the minimum parcel size that could be purchased to 160 acres, which is what Nicholas and his son Jacob acquired as "tenants in common." Payment in full was made by March 27, 1820.

So was that drummer boy story a family myth? I wouldn't discount it entirely at this point. There may be more to the story, or it may have shreds of truth embedded within that more wobbly context of a fourteen year old marching to war. No matter what the eventual determination might be, as we proceed with this search for Nicholas' story in those early years, we need to be open to unexpected possibilities. After all, he didn't show up on American shores with a clearly marked itinerary for all to see. We likely will need to piece that story together through the shreds of documentation we can locate along the trail which brought him to Ohio from Germany.

Is That Really True?

 

As I've seen demonstrated so many times—even including last month's research project—it helps to check out every document that can be found on the siblings of a brick wall ancestor. After all, it's important to keep in mind that though we don't know specific details of our mystery ancestor, someone else might know. The key is to determine just how reliable that someone else's memory might have been.

As I work my way down the line of descendants of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Schneider, I've been looking for any such breakthrough—and I found one, thanks to information linked to a man who was her own father's first cousin. The details were in one of those ubiquitous local history books that were prevalent in the late 1880s through the early 1900s. This particular book, Progressive Men of Minnesota, was published in 1897, over one hundred years after Nicholas was born, but within a few decades of his death. Someone, surely, would remember him and his stories—but the real question I have when reading that published report is, "Is that really true?"

The biographical insert in question from the Progressive Men book was for a man named Louis Edward Gossman. Like my mother-in-law, he descended from Nicholas' son, Jacob Snider. Louis' mother and my mother-in-law's paternal grandmother were sisters. You'd think that would be a relationship close enough that the stories Louis heard from his mother would be about the same as what his cousin heard from his own mother. After all, those moms were sisters.

At first, the exciting realization was that Louis' biographical sketch included information on his grandfather Jacob and his great-grandfather Nicholas. The book, for instance, reported that Louis' maternal grandparents (this would be Jacob and his wife) were natives of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, the report stretched back another generation to affirm that Nicholas came to America about 1778, at the age of fourteen.

The story stretched even further from that. According to the report, Nicholas was "brought to America by other Germans who came over to assist in the cause of the Colonies." Arriving in Pennsylvania, according to this report, young Nicholas joined "Washington's army" as a drummer boy, serving until the end of the war. After that, Nicholas returned home to Germany, but came back to Pennsylvania after a few years.

The article included what seemed to be a helpful detail: Nicholas' residence in Germany. According to the book, he came from "Mayence, Germany." However, a cursory check of locations in current day Germany yielded no leads—although one can't help but realize that if you stretch your imagination just a bit, the pronunciation of Mainz, one city in Germany, sounds somewhat similar to "Mayence."

Well, is that all true? You know I couldn't just sit there and accept that story wholesale, but neither could I reject it out of hand. I had to put some effort into fact checking first.

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.