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.