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.