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.