Nicholas: Patriarch of Many

 

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

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

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

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

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