Is That Really True?

 

As I've seen demonstrated so many times—even including last month's research project—it helps to check out every document that can be found on the siblings of a brick wall ancestor. After all, it's important to keep in mind that though we don't know specific details of our mystery ancestor, someone else might know. The key is to determine just how reliable that someone else's memory might have been.

As I work my way down the line of descendants of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Schneider, I've been looking for any such breakthrough—and I found one, thanks to information linked to a man who was her own father's first cousin. The details were in one of those ubiquitous local history books that were prevalent in the late 1880s through the early 1900s. This particular book, Progressive Men of Minnesota, was published in 1897, over one hundred years after Nicholas was born, but within a few decades of his death. Someone, surely, would remember him and his stories—but the real question I have when reading that published report is, "Is that really true?"

The biographical insert in question from the Progressive Men book was for a man named Louis Edward Gossman. Like my mother-in-law, he descended from Nicholas' son, Jacob Snider. Louis' mother and my mother-in-law's paternal grandmother were sisters. You'd think that would be a relationship close enough that the stories Louis heard from his mother would be about the same as what his cousin heard from his own mother. After all, those moms were sisters.

At first, the exciting realization was that Louis' biographical sketch included information on his grandfather Jacob and his great-grandfather Nicholas. The book, for instance, reported that Louis' maternal grandparents (this would be Jacob and his wife) were natives of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, the report stretched back another generation to affirm that Nicholas came to America about 1778, at the age of fourteen.

The story stretched even further from that. According to the report, Nicholas was "brought to America by other Germans who came over to assist in the cause of the Colonies." Arriving in Pennsylvania, according to this report, young Nicholas joined "Washington's army" as a drummer boy, serving until the end of the war. After that, Nicholas returned home to Germany, but came back to Pennsylvania after a few years.

The article included what seemed to be a helpful detail: Nicholas' residence in Germany. According to the book, he came from "Mayence, Germany." However, a cursory check of locations in current day Germany yielded no leads—although one can't help but realize that if you stretch your imagination just a bit, the pronunciation of Mainz, one city in Germany, sounds somewhat similar to "Mayence."

Well, is that all true? You know I couldn't just sit there and accept that story wholesale, but neither could I reject it out of hand. I had to put some effort into fact checking first.

A Life's Trajectory, Backwards

 

In looking at the First Families applications we've received in our local genealogical society, I often wonder what drew these immigrant families from far and wide to settle in our county. One applicant to our program wished to pursue his patriline back to England. His great-grandfather had settled in California with his parents by 1875, according to his naturalization records. And yet, as I explored the other side of his family—also settlers in our county—I discovered that their trail to San Joaquin County followed a different route.

Annie Caroline Sprengler, long before she met her husband in our county, was born in Utah—or perhaps Colorado, depending on which census record is consulted. Despite the unclear location of Anna's 1860 arrival, her younger sister Katherine was born six years later in California. The family was moving westward. But what brought them to any of these places? What was Anna Sprengler's life trajectory?

To determine this, of course, requires us to follow a person's life story backwards in time, step by step from the date at which we encountered them—usually, for our ancestors, through an obituary or death record—to their earliest record of existence. In Anna's case, uncovering her family's origin required tracing the pathway that brought her parents to the western reaches of the United States.

The Sprengler family was resident in San Joaquin County long before our First Families current cut-off century date of 1924. Anna and her siblings were fully catalogued in the 1880 census while living in O'Neal Township in what now includes the city of Stockton. Her father Valentine, by then fifty two years of age, was listed as a farmer from Bavaria.

Bavaria, however, far predated the time of this census report. Before arriving at any information on that location, there were several events to consider. That 1880 census reported an overview of the family's travels. Eldest child Theodore was born in Illinois while John was born in Iowa. It was this census which recorded Anna's own birth as being in Colorado, before her sister's 1873 birth in California.

It was their father Valentine's own entry in California's 1866 Great Register of voters which helped point us further eastward. According to the note there, Valentine was naturalized on March 30, 1860, in Fayette County, Iowa. 

This, of course, calls into question the report that his daughter Anna was born in either Colorado or Utah in July of that same year.

More records materialized to trace the Sprengler family's progress westward. A land record in 1859, drawn up in Dubuque, Iowa, for Valentine Sprengler "of DuPage County, Illinois," gave the precise location of his purchase of eighty acres in Iowa. This occurred only a few years after his 1854 marriage, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to German immigrant Anna Caroline Koerth.

The beauty of this marriage document was its thoroughness of detail. From that document, we discover Valentine's parents' names—Adam Sprengler and Kunigunde Kressin—and the place of his own birth. While the handwritten entry in Valentine's marriage record looks like his place of birth was "Obferbaum," a quick check of the Meyers Gazetteer provides the slight correction to Opferbaum, a location designated (in German) as "a district of the municipality of Bergtheim in the Lower Franconian district of Würzburg" in Bavaria. 

From Opferbaum in Bavaria to the German port of Bremen to sail to New York City in 1852, then continuing the route to Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa is all laid out by documentation. From that point to California by 1866 is less clear, but it's my guess that Valentine's wife Anna made the trip westward while carrying her namesake daughter. And it's certainly obvious that the entire Sprengler family made it to our county in plenty of time to be considered as one of our Pioneer Families. 

Finding the Stop Between "Here" and "There"

 

It would be so handy in tracing the path of immigrant ancestors if they were careful to leave their homeland and go straight to their new home in that foreign land. In the case of Jan Olejniczak, however, there was this stopping place in between arriving here in the United States from his birthplace in Poland. And I couldn't locate that stopping point to even begin searching for records.

Thanks to discovery of a DNA match who descends from the man who might have been my family's relative Jan Olejniczak, I've been searching through records after his arrival in the United States. In the 1920 census, it was clear that before he arrived in the United States, Jan—his name now anglicized to read John—had not only married but become the proud parent of three children who were born in Germany: Kazmier, Louise, and Lottie. It took quite a bit of examining records of those three Olejniczak children to determine just where in Germany they might have been born. Eventually, the answer surfaced: a town called Reklinghausen.

Easy, I thought: I'll just look up the town in the online, searchable Meyers Gazetteer.

Not so fast, it turned out. "No results" was the answer to my query. I attempted the "sounds like" option, and got several results. Those, however, reminded me of my failed attempts at determining exactly which of multiple Polish towns with the same name might be the right location. So I tried a different approach.

While the original document I had viewed for the origin of Jan's children had spelled the German location as Reklinghausen, an online search yielded a Wikipedia article for the similar spelling of Recklinghausen.

In addition to discovering that the town had been the site of over one hundred witchcraft trials, I learned that it was part of the Ruhr area of western Germany, known for its coal mining activities. Chasing other resources, I gleaned some possible reasons why a Polish young man like Jan Olejniczak might have migrated to that far side of Germany: to get a job in the mines. In fact, Jan would have been in good company there. There was even a German term for those who came from Poland in that influx of Polish immigrants to work the mines in Recklinghausen: Ruhrpolen.

The migration of Polish workers occurred mainly in the 1870s. The significant fact was that most came from the same region where Jan was born. Yet Jan himself would barely have been an infant at that time. Presumably when he did make the move, he would have found a thriving Polish community of his former neighbors and associates when he arrived.

Still to be found, however, are any records of the birth of those three children of Jan and his wife, Pelagia. Nor have I been able to find a marriage record for the couple. The long tasks ahead also include locating passenger lists with the family's names, presumably in a predictable grouping. While I'll be searching to  find more of such genealogical tokens, in the meantime, I'll be tentatively adding this possible branch of the Olejniczak family into my own tree—and reaching out to connect with the DNA match who led me to this clue.

Getting the Right Grandfather

 

In focusing this month's research on my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, Mathias Ambrose, we did learn a few details. June's selection for my "Twelve Most Wanted" taught me some new facts about Mathias.

For one thing, he did not—as I had earlier presumed—live his entire life in Pennsylvania. In discovering his years spent across the border in a British colony to the south—Maryland—I also was led to more information on Mathias' own father, for whom he had been named. If I continue the paper trail another generation further, I'll likely be researching records in Germany, not America.

What I won't be doing, however, is researching another man who was long purported to be our Mathias Ambrose's paternal grandfather. While I am glad I didn't make that wrong turn along the Ambrose patriline, I do want to make note of it here, in case anyone else will be tempted to affix that same name to their own pedigree.

The name once claimed to be Mathias' grandfather was Pierre d'Amboise. In case I ever do continue work on this Ambrose family line, I'm glad to have found an argument against linking the French name to the German family.

The source for this mistaken parental identity was apparently once passed along to the D.A.R., back when applicant records could not be photocopied, but were viewed to verify. For whatever reason, that record was included in the Ambrose family line, according to the explanation, despite the fact that it would pre-date the Revolutionary War Patriot by two generations. After all, our Mathias Ambrose himself was listed as the Patriot.

A man during the appropriate time period, known as Pierre d'Amboise—at least according to documents accessible by 2014—actually lived in northern France, not Germany. Married in 1688, he and his wife had three children. The drawback is that, although one of those children was born after his death in 1694, none of them was named Mathias, as you by now might suspect. 

Now-accessible documents have fixed the date of baptism for Mathias' German-born father—the senior Mathias Ambrose—as February 7, 1696, according to a report on the Ambrose website I've been referring to this month. The christening took place at Brackenheim in Wurttenberg, Germany. No matter how much Pierre might have tried, he would not have been able to be the father of the senior Mathias, born nineteen months later.

The true father? According to that same website, our Mathias' paternal grandfather would again have been named Mathias—or, perhaps, the Latin version of that name, Mattheaus. But that, like all other entries on my mother-in-law's pedigree, will first need to be backed up with some documentation from a church far, far away from where this researcher currently lives.

Reflecting on Eight Greats

 

Let's take a break from zeroing in on the particulars of Nicholas Schneider's early life in Germany. While I gather my wits and, behind the scenes, rehash what other researchers have already asserted about Nicholas and his wife Anna Elizabeth Eckhardt, it might help to turn our thoughts to the ever-instructive concept dubbed the "F.A.N. Club."

The acronym stands for Family, Associates, and Neighbors. The thought behind this concept is simple: rather than striking out on their own as individuals, people tend to do things in groups with the people most familiar to them. While sometimes the groups are composed of friends, and other times represent families or close-knit communities, people in past eras found it safer, wiser, and more supportive to undertake significant projects with a support group.

I bring that concept up simply to recall one thing I've noticed about the settlers of Perry County, Ohio: they certainly seemed to be a tight-knit circle of communities. More importantly, I have noticed a good number of the early settlers had two details in common. One was that they were devoted to the Catholic faith. The other was that several seemed to have traveled to Ohio from an oft-disputed region of Western Europe. Sometimes claimed by the French, other times by the Germans, Alsace-Lorraine, as it once was called, produced a number of subjects who decided to leave for good—and ended up in Perry County.

We already know from the passenger records found for Nicholas and Anna Schneider that their vessel sailed from Emden, Germany. Granted, immigrants from all over the region would travel to a port city on their way to the New World, so it is absolutely probable that the Schneiders did not originate in Emden. But I have my doubts about one location proposed by others researching this family: the city of Mainz. Checking a map, I discovered the distance from Mainz to the port at Emden is about the same as a trip from my home in northern California to Los Angeles: a drive on the interstate of over five hours.

Instead of staring at that brick wall right now, what if we switched our approach momentarily to compare the eight great-grandparents of my mother-in-law? All eight had roots originating in Europe, and all eight ended up in Perry County, Ohio. Could some commonality have drawn them to the same location?

Besides the two Snider lines in my mother-in-law's roots, the other surnames included two Gordon lines (yes, related), plus Flowers, Stine, Metzger, and Mutter (or Mooter). While Gordon does look suspiciously like a Scottish surname, others who knew the founding immigrant ancestor said he spoke with a thick accent, causing some to wonder if he were actually German. Flowers, too, is a line which has me stumped—possibly French, possibly German, almost certainly not English. Stine was likely Stein in the homeland, wherever it was. And Metzger and Mutter originated in Switzerland.

While that seems, overall, to point strongly to German possibilities for the Schneiders' origin, I am still wondering about those borderlands. If DNA companies like Ancestry are still struggling to delineate ethnic identities in border regions—if, indeed, it would even be possible to definitively do so—would an origin such as Alsace-Lorraine throw them off?

It occurred to me to take a peek at the newly-released SideView™ technology at Ancestry.com. After all, though this recent development can't specifically say which side of their readout represents the test-taker's father, and which is the mother's results, I have it rather easy in this case. My mother-in-law married a man whose eight greats all came from Ireland. Other than a surprise sliver of unexpectedness (one percent attributed to Wales), my father-in-law's results would plainly reveal which side of the circle was his projected ancestry.

Let's take a look:

What we see on the left of this diagram, labeled "Parent 1," would be the hypothesized geopolitical origins of my mother-in-law. As you might have guessed, knowing Parent 2's origins in Ireland, the yellow on the left side also represents some Irish roots for my mother-in-law. The large bright-green segment is the color code Ancestry labels "England and Northwestern Europe." Yep, that gray zone of indeterminable ethnicity is now painted green. Almost as if to pacify our inquiring minds, the next greenish color bar represents "Germanic Europe," and the final sliver on my mother-in-law's readout is for France.

While one might presume that such a readout infers that one ancestor bestowed the French heritage and another ancestor was the source of the German ancestry, it is possible that the unclearness of the readout could also be due to as-yet unrecognized ethnic groups sandwiched in between those disputed borders. Whoever such people were, they might have been surviving in spite of their overrun borders—and yet somehow genetically influenced by these same ongoing pressures.

Not that all from that region had flocked to one single location in central Ohio, but it is quite possible that the word had gotten out, spreading from the earlier settlers from that homeland to guide the later arrivals. While that doesn't give us a definitive answer to our question of where Nicholas Schneider originated in Germany, it at least suggests we narrow the scope of possibilities to the western border of what we now know as modern-day Germany.

 

Image above: Example of Ancestry.com's newly-released SideView™ technology, showing the estimated geopolitical origins of immigrant Nicholas Schneider's great-great-granddaughter.    

Introducing a Face With No Name

One would have thought that three lines of writing on the back of a photograph would have at least included one vital detail: the name of the subject. But they didn't. I guess that's what comes of not knowing how to read the language when deciding whether to rescue an abandoned family photograph. Sadly, I don't know German.

What I do know, though, is that this picture was from the mid 1870s, at the least. So I now have in my possession a veritable antique—though that is a dubious claim to make, since my original purpose was to transport such photos from their hiding places on the back shelves of antique shops to the welcoming hands of their long-lost relatives.

Since we've been talking about this one particular photograph I found in northern California—one which apparently came from Heidelberg in Germany—I think it is about time I introduced our subject to you. Of course, this won't be a proper introduction, as I don't know the woman's name. All the same, this is a perfect moment to allow you to make her acquaintance.

I'd love it if, at some point, we could discover her name. Foiled by tiny handwriting in a foreign language, I had hoped we would have enough information already written on the photograph. But no. And so she remains a mere curiosity in my own collection, while surely someone is out there who wishes he or she could have had a picture of that very same ancestor.

Still the Same, No Matter the Place

People find the oddest things to note on the back of photographs. Perhaps that is only because they view such an activity in the context of their current situation: here's a picture from that fun outing we did last week, and, oh, you need to know this unusual detail about some extraneous point about the trip. No names, no dates. Nothing, at least, that an audience one hundred years later might be curious to know.

Of course, the person sending the note on the back of a carte de visite in the 1870s would not normally consider that someone in 2018 would be trying to decipher just what that fountain pen was trying to communicate. What I suspect, however, is that the great-great-grandchildren of the subject of that photograph would like to know a bit more about the thing—at least, if those great-great-grandchildren are anything like me.

Thanks to input from those of you who know people from Germany—or, in one case, someone who actually spent some time living in Heidelberg—we may soon have a verdict on exactly what that handwritten scrawl said on the back of that photograph I found in an antique store in northern California. In the meantime, I thought perhaps the rest of the material written on the back of that small photograph might reveal enough details for us to learn more about the photograph's subject.

So I put the phrases on the back of the picture through their paces at Google Translate and Google Maps.

The photographer listed on the back of this picture, Eduard Schultze, had a studio located in Heidelberg. Above the photographer's name was the entry, "79. Plöckstrasse 79." Though I know nothing about the German language, I thought it might be an educated guess to assume that entry was actually the address of the studio. So I went to check it out on Google Maps. Maybe there was a Plöckstrasse in Heidelberg in 1876, but apparently there isn't any such location there now. Düsseldorf, perhaps. But not Heidelberg.

There's no missing the fact that the photograph was taken in Heidelberg. I had to set aside that puzzle and move on to the next clue: the line printed on the bottom of the card: "Die Platte bleibt für Nachbestellungen aufbewahrt."

How very German I feel, even managing to write all that! But I still have no idea what it means. So off to Google Translate I went with my newfound ability to add umlauts to my English keyboarding capabilities. (Truth be told, I actually cheated here: having selected the translate-from dialog box's target language as German, I clicked on the keyboard icon in the window at Google Translate which said, "turn on Virtual Keyboard." Instant umlauts, which can then be cut and pasted into my text here.)

Being so smart still didn't help my cause. No matter where our ancestors posed for their portrait, all studios seemed to serve up the same offer. In Germany, as in the United States, that offer essentially gave customers a variant of the Schultze studio's promise: "The plate is kept for reordering."

No Hints from Heidelberg

If we can't figure out French handwriting, how about trying German?

I'm still determined to find a way to send home the hundred year old photograph of two adorable French Canadian children, but until I can figure out a way to tap into some local resources in Quebec, Canada, we'll have to set aside that mystery.

Meanwhile, there are more photographs to review from that shopping trip to the antique store in the hills of northern California.

True to form—Gold Rush country seems to yield such results—there were more than that one photograph with an inscription on the reverse in a foreign language. One photograph in particular was an item I couldn't resist buying. For one thing, the handwritten date revealed that was possibly the oldest picture I had found in the store. On the positive side, there were three lines of handwritten notes on the back of that photo. The down side was that I didn't attempt to read what the note said while I was still in the store.

Perhaps I should have tried that approach before buying the thing.

What I thought I was seeing was handwriting in German. After all, the photographer's imprint was from Heidelberg. Sounds pretty German to me. And the size of the picture's format seemed to fit with photographs produced during that time period. But I knew I wouldn't really be able to tell what the handwriting said until I got the thing home, scanned and enlarged it.

That done—months afterwards—I still can't read that handwriting. Perhaps that is owing to that little inconvenience of not knowing how to read German (or at least German script). What I can tell are the two dates—one being the year 1873 and the other a specific date in 1876.

While those three lines of handwriting don't seem to have provided the clues I was hoping for—a name would have been a nice touch—they do say something. And perhaps that something will be pertinent to our search. While I may not know much about the German language—and definitely not much about how it is written—perhaps someone here does.

So, to start with...anyone here know how to read German? Here's the note, as big as I can enlarge it while keeping it fairly legible.

Or maybe it isn't German, after all...