The Snider Will

 

Sometimes, just looking at the details of an ancestor's will can help connect the dots between the current generation of the decedent's offspring and relatives belonging to earlier generations. It is not so much a case of looking at the names of those who will inherit parts of their father's estate, but a matter of examining the connection with witnesses—and sometimes executors—named on the document.

In Nicholas Snider's case, he drew up his will in Perry County, Ohio, and signed it on April 17, 1854. Best I can tell, he died just shy of one year later. His will was presented in court on April 27, 1855. In the brief document, his son Conrad was named first, being the son with whom Nicholas had been living at the time of his death—or at least at the most recent census. Also mentioned in the will were Nicholas' unmarried daughter Catherine as well as his married daughter "Mary" (baptized Maria Augusta), along with several sons.

Looking at the names listed in the will for Nicholas' sons, I can find Jacob, the eldest, then Joseph (being Aloysius Joseph, as the first son by that name was said to have died at sea), and Lewis. Simon was named as executor, but there were no bequests made in the document for him. There was no mention of either Peter or Andrew, Nicholas Snider's two remaining sons, though Peter was certainly alive at the time, being mentioned as a son of Nicholas in a 1902 book, A Biographical Record of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio.

It was the others named in the will that had me wondering, though. In drawing up a will, it was not uncommon to see a close family member of the father's generation called upon to ensure that the provision of the will be attended to faithfully. Sometimes, such a person might be the widow's brother, for instance, but in other cases, a trusted business partner might be called upon.

In the case of Nicholas Snider, he chose one of his sons to serve as executor. For the witnesses to his will, he asked two men to sign: John Lidey and David Church. Both of those names stump me. I am fairly certain neither of them were connected to Nicholas' wife's family—and at any rate, she had already died, so there was no need to protect her interests in her widowhood. 

The question still comes up in my mind, though: when Nicholas moved his family from Pennsylvania—even by way of Maryland—was there no one from among his own family to make the long trip to Ohio with him? I'm still looking for familiar surnames, but records on this end of his life are too far removed from the time period when any other family members might still be alive. Perhaps returning to those earliest census records might help spot possible connections in either 1810 back in Adams County, Pennsylvania, or 1820 after the family removed to Perry County, Ohio.

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. 

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.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

 

It began with a hint from Ancestry.com for my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider. Whether he actually spelled his surname that way—or Schneider, or Snyder, both of which I've also seen in records—I can't tell. But sometime during the year of his death, according to this hint, his heirs appeared in court to make a claim based on his Revolutionary War service.

Keeping in mind the Revolutionary War story I had already encountered from the biographical sketch of another descendant of Nicholas, I was all eyes to read the faded and blurry text of this handwritten court entry. Who wouldn't have appreciated a hint like that?!

Taking a first glance at the documents, I spotted some details which agreed with what I already knew about this ancestor: that by the 1855 date of that document, Nicholas was already deceased, as was his wife. Encouragingly, his wife's name on the court record was listed as Elizabeth—a detail which didn't initially disturb me, for the 1850 census had entered her name that same way, despite her full given name being Anna Elizabeth.

Even the son named as heir in this record, who was bringing his petition to court that day, was Jacob, same as our Nicholas Snider's eldest son. That, however, was where the similarities ended.

I've learned long ago that, despite the ease of genealogy websites' habit of providing the breadcrumbs of "hints" to guide us along our research path, one must always—repeat after me, "Always. Always. ALWAYS"—look at the document. With this instance, though, I'll provide an addendum: look at the entire document, not just the first few paragraphs. There are other families out there, believe it or not, who named their children the same names your own ancestors preferred.

I didn't need to read much further when I realized that having another son named Nicholas, while a likely choice for a father by that same name, was not in the records for our Nicholas. Yes, he had many sons—eight that I can find so far—but none of them became his father's namesake.

Furthermore, while our Nicholas did live in Pennsylvania at one point—the location where this petition was brought to court—he certainly didn't die there. As far as I can tell, of his sons who lived to adulthood, all traveled west with him to Perry County, Ohio.

So, the two sons of Nicholas and Elizabeth, who filed their complaint in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 1855? Though they claimed that their father was a soldier in the Revolutionary War, their father was certainly not our Nicholas Snider of Perry County, Ohio, even though he also once lived in Pennsylvania. 

How did that Ancestry hint find its way to my family tree? I suspect it's because several other Ancestry subscribers saw that same document and did the easy thing: click to add it to their tree without reading the thirty six pages of documentation appended to the case file inspecting the original pension claim.

Since I did take a look, I discovered a few interesting points. First discovery was that the Nicholas in question, who died in 1828, was neither of the Snyder Patriots listed in the DAR website. However, even in the packet of documents in the rejected pension file, it seemed that sometimes the applicant was confused with the DAR Patriot who died in 1786.

More to my current question was a letter in the pension packet written in 1916 to the Honorable Halvor Steenerson. At the time of the letter, Halvor Steenerson was a member of Congress representing Crookston in Polk County, Minnesota—the very place where Louis Edward Gossman of that 1897 biographical sketch which prompted this search also lived and worked. Apparently, at the time of the letter, Louis Gossman was then serving as judge.

The letter in response to the congressman's query on behalf of the judge confirmed the same details I had found by reading the entire pension packet: that the Nicholas whose rejected application was on file was a man who died in Pennsylvania in 1828. Apparently, by 1916 Judge Gossman had had second thoughts about that family tale as well, and was seeking some verification—long after, I might add, he had offered that family story for his published biographical sketch.

Just in case the Honorable Steenerson's status wasn't sufficient to round up some solid evidence, I did further reading on Revolutionary War pension applications and bounty land warrant records. A quick and easy index to applicants by state revealed no Nicholas Snyder mentioned from the state of Ohio—especially none from Perry County, home of our Nicholas Snider. But I suspect that even if the judge himself, a descendant of our Nicholas, came to seek verification of that family story in later years, perhaps it would serve us well to remember that old advice: don't believe everything you read—or hear. It may just be a family myth.

Plotting the Path to the Past

 

One way to connect our ancestors to their past is to literally trace the path they followed through life—but only on rewind. We need to plot that path backwards through time.

For my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas—whose surname in America eventually came to be spelled Snider—that means starting from the spot of his last days in Perry County, Ohio. We can see from the 1850 census—the last enumeration in which his name appeared—that he was a resident of Hopewell Township, one of the three northernmost townships in the county. He presumably had remained there ever since paying full price in 1820 for the southwest quarter of section twenty two of the land he and his son Jacob had acquired as tenants in common, thanks to the Harrison Land Act of 1800.

Before that, according to another one of those biographical sketches published over a century ago, Nicholas had arrived in Ohio from Pennsylvania, but apparently first by way of Maryland. This report I obtained from a book published in 1902, A Biographical Record of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio. The sketch was actually concerning Nicholas' grandson, William Snider, who was 

a son of Peter and Eleanor (Dean) Snider. His father was born in Maryland in 1816 and was a son of Nicholas Snider, who about 1818 removed from Maryland to Ohio, entering land from the government one mile north of Somerset, in Reading township.

But was this really true? Right away, we can see a conflict in reports again, having just viewed the census record identifying Nicholas' home as having been situated in Hopewell Township. Perhaps by that time, Nicholas' age had warranted his releasing the land to his son Jacob—or perhaps he had simply sold one property to purchase another. Land records can help resolve that discrepancy, but the bigger question is: where did Nicholas and his family live before arriving in Ohio?

To answer that question, we'd need to reach back to the 1810 census. One possible candidate might be the "Nicholass Snyder" whose family resided in Adams County, Pennsylvania. There, his household was composed of two sons under ten years of age and another one between the ages of ten and fifteen, along with a daughter under ten. These could easily be our Nicholas' eldest son Jacob, born in 1799, and younger brothers Joseph and Lewis, plus his oldest daughter Catherine. The ages given for the two adults in the household also fit Nicholas and his wife, Anna Elizabeth.

Could there have been a stop in Maryland before moving onward to Ohio? Very likely: Adams County in Pennsylvania bordered the state line with Maryland. The family could have sold their land in Pennsylvania too close to the date of Peter's birth, and decided on an interim stop in Maryland before heading to their intended destination.

The discovery of that 1810 census does pinpoint a location for Nicholas' family in Pennsylvania. While that seems to be helpful, it also dropped a pin on the Pennsylvania map which caused some conflict with another record I found for a Nicholas Snyder—this one in Cumberland County, just one county to the north of Adams County. We'll need to take some time to evaluate whether that was our Nicholas or not. 

After Forty Eight Hours: Up the Ante?

It may feel like I've been wandering around in circles, trying to poke my way through a document brick wall hiding the story of Nicholas Schneider, but behind the scenes, I've been trying a different approach: DNA testing. Though my mother-in-law is no longer here to help verify the cousin matches descending from her second great-grandfather Nicholas, you can be sure her son did test—and I've been carefully sifting through those many DNA cousins' family trees since the start of this month.

One encouraging sign was to see the 268 DNA matches shared on this line of descent. I was also jazzed to read that, at least at Ancestry DNA, if I make updates to the family tree, Ancestry will generally update their list of matches within forty eight hours. Well, it's been forty eight hours (at least) since I began updating this Schneider/Snider/Snyder line on my mother-in-law's tree. Any increase in DNA matches?

Any time I update my tree based on information gleaned from DNA matches, it's a two-step process requiring not just the addition of DNA matches to my tree, but of documentation to support each additional person. Of course, what ends up happening is not just the addition of that one person, but of that one's spouse—and the names of the spouse's parents—and members of the next generation, too. Just in the past five days, I've probably added over fifty new names to my mother-in-law's tree, just by going through those DNA matches.

Surely the addition of fifty new family members to the tree should result in something, shouldn't it? After all, those fifty new names are just from the twenty four descendants of Nicholas' son Jacob that I've managed to complete. But after forty eight hours, not only did I gain absolutely zero new matches, but I actually lost one. How could that be?

From time to time, I've noticed the count on DNA matches has shrunk. This could be for a variety of reasons. I'm guessing one might be that some DNA customers could have gotten nervous about all the negative DNA news out there—right now, it's the backlash over news about 23andMe, but in the past, it's been about the Golden State Killer and other reactions to current events involving DNA—and withdrawn their participation in viewing matches. Another way could have been that the customer's tree was taken private and unsearchable. Or perhaps someone discovered that, whoops, that wasn't my parent's ancestor after all, and made a total change to that family tree.

For right now, though, that means there is one less DNA match linked to Nicholas' son Jacob—moving in exactly the opposite direction from what I had anticipated. Perhaps I need to up the ante and double down on adding descendants to Nicholas' tree to see what might happen in the next forty eight hour period. After all, Nicholas Schneider left a pretty robust family after all these generations. There are plenty more to add to this line.   

Looking for Answers

The good thing about finding a relative in one of those old genealogy books is that we can always double-check the book's assertions. We have the tools for that now, unlike the limitations authors faced in those previous centuries, when all they had was wood-burning genealogy websites. When we're looking for answers to questions about brick wall ancestors, there's no need to shy away from publications from a previous age of genealogical research. It's okay; we can do this.

Thus, when I spotted a hundred-twenty-plus entry for a cousin on my mother-in-law's Snider line, there was no need to reject it out of hand. First, I could look up each of the assertions in the report. After all, the article spoke of Nicholas Schneider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather and the focus of this month's Twelve Most Wanted—and I did want to know something more about this founding immigrant on the Snider/Snyder side of her family.

The entry in question was a biographical sketch concerning Louis Edward Gossman in the 1897 book, Progressive Men of Minnesota. In that entry, we can find the assertion that Mr. Gossman's great-grandfather—called Nicholas Snyder—had come to America with a company of German immigrants in 1778, when he was just fourteen year of age. According to that narrative, Nicholas joined "Washington's army" in Pennsylvania as a drummer boy, and served for the remainder of the war, after which he returned—though only briefly—to Germany.

Well? Could that be so? That's when I started looking for those answers. The National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution happen to host an online resource for looking up such details, so my first stop was to hop on over to their website. One sticking point about such a search was the variety of spellings used for this family's surname—I've seen Schneider, Snider, and Snyder—so I made sure to search using each of those versions.

Result? Schneider yielded nothing. Trying Snider generated a message directing me to use an alternate spelling, which the website handily suggested: Snyder. And for that third attempt, I was rewarded with two possibilities, both from Pennsylvania.

The only problem was that neither man was of the correct age. One was born in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania—rather than my Nicholas' birth somewhere in Germany—and the age was a bit older than the Progressive Men narrative had suggested. The other possibility was a man born in Germany, but my hopes were dashed when I saw the year of birth: 1732. That Nicholas' date of death in 1786 was sure to nix the possibility entirely.

So much for the tale of Revolutionary War service for my Nicholas, at least if we are relying on currently confirmed records of service. But what about the fact that Nicholas Snider eventually obtained land in Ohio, where he settled with his growing family? Could he have received Bounty Land? Checking for General Land Office records at the Bureau of Land Management, I noticed that Nicholas obtained his 160 acre parcel not by service in the war, but by the authority of the Harrison Land Act of 1800.

The ground-breaking virtue of that legislation was that it opened up settlement in "western" territorial locations by allowing people to purchase land with a credit feature: one-fourth down, with the remainder to be paid over a four year period. A subsequent change in that arrangement in 1804 reduced the minimum parcel size that could be purchased to 160 acres, which is what Nicholas and his son Jacob acquired as "tenants in common." Payment in full was made by March 27, 1820.

So was that drummer boy story a family myth? I wouldn't discount it entirely at this point. There may be more to the story, or it may have shreds of truth embedded within that more wobbly context of a fourteen year old marching to war. No matter what the eventual determination might be, as we proceed with this search for Nicholas' story in those early years, we need to be open to unexpected possibilities. After all, he didn't show up on American shores with a clearly marked itinerary for all to see. We likely will need to piece that story together through the shreds of documentation we can locate along the trail which brought him to Ohio from Germany.