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.