Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

 

You just have to be careful if you are building a family tree of people who lived in places like Perry County, Ohio. That's where my mother-in-law grew up, a place where high school students had best produce their family pedigree if the first date night went well—friends could unknowingly be cousins.

Thus, when I rewind my mother-in-law's family tree to the generations before her time, I end up adding spouses who, whoops, turned out to be cousins of some sort. Time to merge identities on that family tree—I already have that spouse's parents listed in a different branch of the family tree.

So it's no surprise, in doing my biweekly count today, to see I hadn't advanced quite as much as I thought I'd have gone, in adding Snider DNA matches to my mother-in-law's tree. It had felt like I had added so many more individuals—until I realized how many identities I had merged. Those branches on the family tree are indeed twisting and turning.

Still, I've added 519 more individuals to my mother-in-law's tree, mainly by verifying the Snider DNA matches I've been working on this month. And that number is certainly plenty for two weeks of work. Her tree now includes 38,371 individuals.

Since this month's research goal for my Twelve Most Wanted was to focus on the family of her second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider, the bulk of the work has been on connecting the 265 DNA matches listed on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool for this ancestor. It's been a slow slog. But that also precludes any progress on my own family tree, which is holding steady at 40,223 people. It won't be until the mid-autumn when I'll return to working on that tree. I anticipate that my in-laws' tree will bypass that number easily before October gets here.

In the next three days, I'll try to slam-dunk those additional Snider DNA matches, as well as review two historical documents in hopes of building a F.A.N. Club network for Nicholas Snider: passenger records for his supposed arrival from Germany in 1804, and church records from Conewago Chapel in Adams County, Pennsylvania, where some of his children were baptized. After those three brief days of working on this goal, it will be time to pack it up with a summary for the next time I work on this line—and then, move on to my research goal for May.