Revisiting Old Resources

 

When stuck on brick wall ancestors, sometimes I find it helpful to revisit old resources to see if perhaps I had missed a detail from the record the first time around. This month, I'm focusing on one particular brick wall ancestor: my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider. Since nothing from his records in Perry County, Ohio—this German immigrant's final home—helped me trace his origin, perhaps documents from his previous home in Pennsylvania might be worth a second examination. For that, we need to direct our attention to Adams County, Pennsylvania. 

If Nicholas Snider came to Ohio from Pennsylvania, what makes me so sure he came from Adams County? It is thanks to one particular record set that I find indications of this possible stopping point: the baptismal records preserved from a Catholic Church known as Conewago Chapel. Officially called the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the church was built in the mid-1780s.

Fortunately for our purposes, transcriptions of the baptismal records from Conewago Chapel preserve some of the information I'm seeking. In addition, thanks to the work of institutions like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and their partnership with Ancestry.com, I not only have a searchable resource which includes the digitized version of the actual Conewago Chapel baptism entries, but an index by county of all Pennsylvania churches included in Ancestry's collection, "Pennsylvania and New Jersey, U.S., Church and Town Records, 1669-2013."

 Thus, I can find the record for Aloysius Josephus "Shnider" who was baptized there on March 25, 1810, and for his sister Maria Augusta "Schneider" on June 20, 1812. I've noted each child's sponsors—for Joseph it was Joseph and Mary Hildebrand, and for Maria, Catherine Gibbons—in case those surnames become important clues in the future to possible family connections.

As for the Adams County connection for the Snider family, I want to dig deeper, in case I can find other records which might reveal further details on Nicholas and where he originated. After all, though we have the family listed in the 1810 census there, reaching back another decade leads me...nowhere at this point.