Following That Opportunity

When settlers from the original thirteen United States decided to move westward, you can be sure they chose that route because they saw the chance to gain personal benefits. Their impetus to move westward was an unprecedented opportunity to obtain farmland.

There were, of course, incentives available to anyone hardy enough to take up the challenge of moving to the frontier. By the late 1700s, that had become the heritage of almost every immigrant arriving on American shores; they had come to expect that immigration could improve their situation, and perhaps had seen that very scenario play itself out in the generations preceding their own lifetime.

For those who had fought in the Revolutionary War (and subsequent service), there were military bounty land warrants to be claimed. Following the issuing of those first offerings, additional congressional legislation served to open up what was then called the Northwest Territory to wave after wave of settlers.

Whether the families I am researching served in the Revolutionary War, I don't yet know. All I know at this point is that the Nicholas Schneider family from Adams County, Pennsylvania, made it to Perry County, Ohio, in time for his son Jacob to meet and marry Elizabeth Stine, daughter of a family who had moved to Ohio from Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Their wedding in 1825 thus serves as a marker to help us delineate the approximate time of their families' arrival in Perry County.

Why did they head to Ohio? Though I don't yet know of any involvement with the Continental Army for either family, I do know of other opportunities which opened up land for settlers. First was the Harrison Land Act, which was passed in 1800, enabling people to purchase land in the Northwest Territory directly from the government, even on credit.

The drawback to that land act, though, was that it required people to purchase at least 320 acres of land. At a price of at least two dollars per acre—a steal in today's economy—the cost was still prohibitive for many, hence the revision in terms with the Land Act of 1804. The newer act, while keeping the price of the land the same, reduced the mandated size of the parcels to 160 acres, a more affordable option.

To facilitate the sale of the territorial lands, Congress authorized the opening of land offices in 1800. Three possible land offices which might have played a role in the sale of land to my mother-in-law's ancestors were opened around that same time. One, at Marietta, would have been of particular interest to those arriving in central Ohio by way of the river route from Pittsburgh on the Ohio, as it was the town at the mouth of the Muskingum River leading northward toward Perry County; that office was in operation from 1800 to 1840.

Another land office, opening only a few years later, was at nearby Zanesville, conveniently upon the overland route known as Zane's Trace. That land office was established in 1804 and, like the Marietta office, continued operations until 1840. Though farther to the south, the land office at Chillicothe also served the area from 1801 to 1876.

Sure enough, in looking for signs that the Stine family might have taken up the offer of land in Ohio, the General Land Office Records of the Bureau of Land Management revealed one Jacob Stine had purchased land in what was to become Perry County. He did so in partnership with someone named Moses Petty. The document was drawn up through the Chillicothe Land Office and was dated July 6, 1816.

A few years later—in 1820, to be exact—Nicholas "Snyder" and another Snyder by the name of Jacob, likely Nicholas' son, obtained their own parcel through the same Land Office, demonstrating when they officially became land owners in Perry County, and at the same time, allowing us to more closely zero in on when each family arrived in the area which, in 1818, officially became designated as Perry County.

Knowing when each family arrived in Perry County, and discovering that each family became landowners, helps us find additional clues about their situation. Considering that we know very little about Elizabeth Stine besides the date of her marriage, that leaves us with few hints about her family, other than her father's name. It would have been more helpful to discover that the other party to the land transaction was also a member of the Stine family. That leaves us with the question, who was Moses Petty, and why did he choose to purchase land as "tenant in common" with Elizabeth's father?

Hopefully, discovering information about Moses Petty will allow us to learn more about Elizabeth's family, as well. 

    

Rollin' on the River

When we research our families from the early 1800s in the nascent United States, we can easily see when they came from one location and, eventually, landed in another, more western location. But how much thought do we give to the consideration of how these people moved their families hundreds of miles? It is not hard to stumble upon references in history books about the lack of roads or, in the case of their existence, how awful those trails could be. In the case of many of our ancestors as they faced such conditions in their migrattion westward across the North American continent, they did have an alternative: river travel.

In puzzling over my mother-in-law's great-grandmother, Elizabeth Stine, I can see from historical records that she was born somewhere in Pennsylvania, yet she lived her adult life in Perry County, Ohio. Of course, my main question is: with whom did that young, unmarried woman make that wilderness trek of hundreds of miles? It helps, in delving into that question, to see what options were available to her migrating family.

The same scenario likely played out in the case of her husband-to-be, Jacob Snider, whose family also came west to Ohio from Pennsylvania. I have it from other Stine and Snider researchers I connected with, decades ago—back when online genealogy was in its infant stages—that the Stine family may have come from Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and that the Sniders removed from neighboring Adams County. With both of those counties pressed firmly against the southern border of the state, and facing the challenging route of crossing the Appalachians to their west, one option for migration in those early years was to hit the road.

The road, however, was often a co-opted ancient trail used by native populations long before the arrival of European settlers, and certainly not built to accommodate the wagons or stagecoaches preferred by the emigrants. Such would be the "road" leading through the land which eventually became Perry County. Known as Zane's Trace—after Ebenezer Zane, from whom nearby Zanesville took its name—it afforded a westward-bound settler one route to central Ohio.

A more reasonable route, in those days before established roads in the Northwest Territory, was to take to the waterways. With this choice of transportation, a migrating family need only haul their earthly belongings westward on the less-than-desireable roads of central and western Pennsylvania until they could reach Pittsburgh or another suitable jumping-off place. From there, they could purchase a flatboat to move their goods down the Ohio River.

The Ohio, being a tributary of the Mississippi River yet possibly the main stream of the whole Mississippi River system, could move people and their goods down river to lands in Kentucky and beyond—eventually, even to the Gulf of Mexico, if one wished. Our families migrating to the Perry County area, though, need only travel the Ohio River as far as the newly-established town of Marietta, where the Ohio met the mouth of the Muskingum River.

From there, the Muskingum could—depending on the season and the year's level of rainfall—bring a family northward to tap into a system of rivers and creeks circling the north and east of Perry County.

No matter which way the Stines or the Sniders chose to travel from south central Pennsylvania to the middle of the new state of Ohio, there were, indeed, options on how to arrive there.

But the key question to ask is not just how they got to Perry County, but why they decided, in those early years of our country, to go through all the trouble to get there.

Seeing the Past From Its Future

The problem with genealogical research, of course, is that we are trying to see our ancestors' past from a time period which remains in our forebears' future. In some cases, that means imagining what life was like for our grandparents during the early 1900s from a perspective embedded with one hundred years of experience; after all, we don't "get" outhouses or ice houses or even telegrams. (Some of us can't even comprehend phones attached by cords to walls.)

To stretch that effort of comprehension to the lengths of our second or third great-grandparents' era requires a lot more than mere empathy. We need to delve into a broader perspective of the time period and the local history to help us better see what life was like for those ancestors.

Right now, I'm trying to unearth the basic outline of the life of my mother-in-law's great-grandmother, a woman born in the early 1800s in Pennsylvania. Though I know her maiden name was spelled Stine, it could very well have taken a more German appearance when her parents or grandparents spelled that surname—if, in fact, they knew how to write at all.

Such details, though, are on the far end of her past, and from my researcher's vantage point at the far end of this woman's distant future, I can't see very much about her life, at all. So I start from the end of her life to introduce what I've been able to discover about her so far.

On this end of life, that Stine daughter was known as Elizabeth Snider—but even that presents some research challenges, among them the spelling of that surname. In some records, the surname was spelled Snider, in others as Snyder. Looking far into her future, as her many children immigrated away from the state where she married and raised them, those who moved to Iowa or Minnesota took to spelling their name as Snyder, while those who remained in Ohio seemed to favor Snider.

When I face difficulties in researching a common surname, I often take in the bigger perspective by first learning what I can about the surname. In the case of Snider or Snyder, I learned that the surname took on more variations in spelling than even I could imagine. Apparently—at least, according to Wikipedia—Snider is an anglicized version of the Dutch word meaning tailor: Snijder. Another way it was originally spelled was Sneijder. Of course, there is the German version, Schneider, but there is also a Swiss-German form spelled Schnyder. Just seeing all these forms of the one surname opens my eyes to other possibilities for this family's land of origin.

Elizabeth Snider's married surname was a popular one in the state in which she lived as an adult. At least today, more Sniders live in the United States than any other country in the world. The surname ranks in the top one thousand names in this country. Eight percent of all the Sniders living in the United States live in Ohio.

All that to say, finding the right Elizabeth Snider, wife of Jacob, could be a challenge, even back during the time in which she lived. But since we are taking our first look at her history from the perspective of the end and working our way back to the beginning, we can see that she lived a long life settled, mostly, in the same place. We also can glean some information on her family by looking at all her children, of which she birthed at least ten. Because she died in 1881, her long life affords us the ability to gaze into her personal life at least through the decennial snapshots of each census record from 1850 through 1880.

However, tracing the lives of her four sons and six daughters did not reveal much about their parents' origins. Their lifespans did not reach far enough into the future to avail us of handy documents which would include such clues as mother's maiden name. And wills, when found, did not show the kind of information about that distant past that I seek.

Pushing back beyond that barrier of the 1850 census does reveal a few Ohio connections, at least in Perry County, to other Stines in the area. Some of those claiming the same surname as Elizabeth's maiden name might or might not be related to her father's family. But one thing I can be fairly certain of: if Elizabeth—or "Eliza"—were married in 1825, that seventeen year old surely did not travel by herself to Perry County in the early years of Ohio's statehood. If Elizabeth got married in Perry County, at least one of her male relatives surely had traveled there with her.

The question then becomes, which Stine men in Perry County by 1830 might have been Elizabeth's kin? In her future, she lived in a part of the county surrounded by farmland owned by her many Snider brothers-in-law, but what of her earlier years? Who were those other Stines? And how did they arrive in Ohio from their previous residence in Pennsylvania?

To answer that, we need to take a broader look at another aspect of life in that time period: the way people got around in the early 1800s—and why they chose to do so.

Close Relationships and Long Generations

Sometimes, I look at the relationships on those barely-complete branches of the family trees under my care and think, "That is such a close relationship to know nothing about."

In today's case, we'll be looking at a woman of whom I know very little, despite her relationship to my mother-in-law being as close as great-grandmother. When I realize that there are many people in this country who actually could remember spending time with their own great-grandparents, I begin to wonder why this woman's history slipped through her family's fingers.

On the other hand, we have to consider the span of generations in any given family. For some families, a generation can be counted off, every twenty years or so, providing the newly-arrived infant in such a family a great-grandmother who might only be her sixties—not an unreasonable scenario. In stark contrast, take a family such as mine, where a generation might stretch as far as fifty years before the next one comes along, and children might not even have had a chance to meet their own grandparents.

Such was the case in my mother-in-law's family. On her paternal branch, the years between generations started with a first leap of forty-five years. By the time we get to her paternal grandmother, we've added another forty two years. Before you know it, we're talking about a great-grandmother who was born in 1808—not exactly someone whom she could invite to even her first birthday party.

Of course, I don't have any proof of Elizabeth Stine Snider's year of birth; I need to rely on reports found on census records from her later years. Thankfully, this woman lived until 1881, affording me a peek into her life from documents dated 1850 through the 1880 census in Perry County, Ohio. And despite her many children, they, too, all died before state records kept the kind of details a genealogist seeks.

Besides what can be gleaned from census records, it was thanks to a personal visit to the courthouse at Perry County that I was able to ascertain her marriage information. According to the "Male Index to Marriages, Perry County," there was an entry for an "Eliza" Stine who married Jacob Snyder on 14 November, 1825. Thankfully, I had a copy made of that record, since the marriage information posted either at FamilySearch.org or at Ancestry.com is now barely legible.

Jacob, as it turns out, was part of a large family of German immigrants, many of whom traveled through Pennsylvania to settle in the same place in Ohio: Perry County. And like his parents before him, Jacob's own family was large—and prone to keep traveling west.

Perhaps it was that his time span—and that of his wife Elizabeth's—put him falling in all the historical cracks which defeat a researcher's hope of discovery. Short of making another trip to central Ohio—not in my future, at this point—it will be hard to go digging through the kind of documents which have yet to make their appearance online, but can be found (with difficulty) through a hands-on search in person.

Then again, perhaps searching for someone with a name as common as Snyder—or whatever German spelling equivalent it might have taken, two hundred years ago—can become a defeating effort in its own right. Couple that with the common surname Stine—perhaps at one point spelled Stein—and mix in the uncertainties of surviving documentation from that time period in the then-frontier region of the northwest territory, and you have a recipe for the kind of research woes that have confronted me regarding this couple.

There is, of course, the Find A Grave entries for both Elizabeth Stine and her husband Jacob Snider. Find A Grave memorials, however, are informational entries put together by volunteers. Though all volunteers are dedicated workers, thanks to the passion they bring to the endeavor, not all volunteer-originated entries are one hundred percent correct. In this case, thankfully, I do recognize the name of the volunteer responsible for the entry and recall that she once told me she had published a genealogy on this family line. Hopefully, the trail she is blazing will be a reliable path for other researchers.

All that said, tomorrow we'll look at some of the initial research challenges in an introduction to Jacob Snider and his wife—the object of my research goals for this month—Elizabeth Stine.

It's Later Than You Think

So, we let those clocks "spring ahead" Saturday night, only to wake up in the grayest hint of light Sunday morning, thinking, "Go back to sleep; it's too early"—and then bolting awake, realizing that I'd have to readjust my estimation of the time versus assessment of sunlight. I had to remind myself: "It's later than you think."

Same thing here, while I'm head-bashing against a genealogical brick wall: it's later than I think. I'm struggling, once again, with an ancestor who refuses to budge and give up his secrets. In the meantime, while I had twelve research goals outlined so nicely on the eve of this new year, back at the end of December, I've let two of those months slip away without gaining the upper hand on those research plans. Both William Alexander Boothe in Virginia and Simon Rinehart in Ohio have managed to evade me, even after a full month's pursuit of each ancestor.

I do have some plans that evolved from last month's research experience. For one thing, learning to pay attention to witnesses as well as executors when they are not obviously the decedent's own son, has become a helpful addition to my research toolbox. While I wish there was a handy way to search online for those named as executors and witnesses, as well as searching for the name of the testator, I won't bemoan that lack.

Instead—and in the background so I don't drag you through this research monotony—I'll set up a database of all my mother-in-law's Gordon and Rinehart ancestors who have left wills in either Perry County, Ohio, or Greene County, Pennsylvania, listing the executor named as well as the witnesses for each decedent's name. Then, I can add any notes about relationships, which hopefully will lead me to some helpful clues in sorting the members of these extended—and multiply-intermarried—families.

While I have that chore progressing in the background, for this new month, I need to move on to another of my Most Wanted ancestors. Since March is Women's History Month, I'd like to move on to my next research challenge among those Most Wanted: a woman in my mother-in-law's tree about whom I know very little.

Like my Boothe and Gordon challenges from the previous months, this woman claims both a maiden and a married name which could be considered quite common, making the task of discovering additional information about her even more challenging. Like the Rinehart puzzle from February with its link to the Gordons, this woman's family traveled to Perry County, Ohio, from Pennsylvania. And, also like the Rineharts, her family's origin was in Germany.

Unlike the others on my Twelve Most Wanted list, for whom I have nearly given up on account of research fatigue, this woman is one of whom I know so little only because there really was no call to pursue her further. But in this Women's History Month, perhaps this is the appropriate time to let her voice be heard among the chorus of ancestors in my mother-in-law's tree.

Tomorrow, we'll begin the process to discover what we can learn about Elizabeth Stine, wife of James Snider.

Ancestor #5 = The Least Known Ancestor

Can a person whose family has been, in some cases, in this country since the early 1700s possibly not know anything about her own great-grandmother? I'd find that impossible—impossible, at least, until I started delving into my own family tree, with all its secrets, missing origins and disguised names. And I have to remember that I'm now working on the family tree of a woman who once told me she was sure it was her own grandparents who had probably just "gotten off the boat." How inaccurate that guess turned out to be.

Except...in one case. After all these years of researching my mother-in-law's family tree, I still can't pinpoint any more information on her paternal grandmother's mother than her name and year of birth and death. And that is all I'll have to work with, as I add Elizabeth Stine to my Most Wanted Ancestors list for 2020.

Here's what I know about Elizabeth Stine. First, that she was listed as Eliza Stine on her 1825 marriage record in Perry County, Ohio, where she said "I do" to someone labeled as Jacob Snyder—probably James Jacob Snyder, son of German immigrant Nicholas Dominic Schneider. Second, that she was likely born in Pennsylvania, arriving about 1808, based on census reports. Finally, that she probably died as a widow in Perry County, Ohio, in 1881.

Elizabeth Stine Snyder represents the oldest of my mother-in-law's most recent ancestors for whom I have such a little bit of information, other than the basic dates and regions. Though I know of no enticing story about her, or any research tidbits that would either intrigue me to pursue her or repel me from the pursuit, I feel as if I owe it to myself—not to mention my in-laws—to try my best to learn more about this next-to-invisible woman ancestor.

Above: "Mill in Winter," 1897 oil on canvas by Polish artist Ferdynand Ruszczyc (1870-1936); image courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Day Thirty-One: Scary

One month in on my Fall Cleanup project, and I am just now hitting the folder for "S." Scary. There's not much month left in this marathon.

Notwithstanding the fact that my own surname begins with that letter, thankfully, the folders I'm routing from my old file cabinet contained papers from my earliest years of online research for my family's roots. Back then, I had started with my mother-in-law's lines; the pursuit of my father-in-law's Irish roots came much later.

Still, my mother-in-law had her own fair share of surnames beginning with that popular letter of the alphabet. Snider, for one. Then Stine.

The first of those names claimed a thick file. A very thick file. I've heard it said that Snider is one of most common surnames in the state of Ohio, and I believe it. Finding the right Snider was a challenge that many of us addressed in online forums, back in the 1990s, apparently. And I was the one to insure that all those threads got printed up and preserved for posterity.

Well, my progeny can now heave a sigh of relief. I tossed almost all of the Snider speculations—plus a good handful of other people's family group sheets and IGI leftovers. Anything I'd want to add to my own database, I'd first want to have accompanied by some solid documentation, thank you.

Stine was a different matter. It may have taken me twenty years to get up to speed on Snider, but Stine had definitely been reserved a permanent seat on the back burner. Like Rinehart from yesterday's cleanup, Stine was a name oft talked about, yet not really successfully pinned in the right spot on the genealogical database. Like Snider, Stine was a name which many people in Pennsylvania and Ohio claimed, but few aligned with my family's story.

When I began this project at the beginning of October, it wasn't as if I had decided to complete it all in one month. But I thought it would be nice. At least, it would make a tidy package: all wrapped up in one month sounded inspiring.

When I got mired in the Flowers part of my family's surname alphabet, though, I gave up hope on that prospect, forgetting that letters like "I" or "K" might not present as daunting a heap of work to conquer.

Now, facing that last stretch from "S" to the end of the line, the rest of the day may yield me the prize: an empty file cabinet drawer, ready to be filled with all the rest of the genealogical files I've currently relegated to storage boxes tucked away in the far reaches of the house. I already know that the folder for "T" will not contain any Tully information, because I hadn't yet tackled that research problem—though it does also include a file for Taliaferro, that surname which gained me entrance to Daughters of the American Revolution.

Maybe, just maybe, since I've already overcome the hump that is "S," I can reach the goal of making it to "Z" before the day—and the month—is out.  

Above: "Glen Birnam," oil on canvas circa 1890 by English artist Sir John Everett Millais; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain. 

A Heritage of Flowers

When, as a newlywed, I first interviewed my mother-in-law about recollections of her family history, she was certain I wouldn't have long to research before discovering that her family had "just gotten off the boat."

As it turned out, it took a journey back to the 1700s before I could even budge that family line out of her native Ohio. And then, we only moved the clan back to Pennsylvania. Hardly what I call "just getting off the boat."

My mother-in-law's patrilineal line, at current—and at least within our own extended family—has only one survivor who could qualify to take the Y-DNA test that would trace the Flowers line's "deep ancestry." Her immediate line has "daughtered out," leaving only her brother—the proud papa of three daughters—as sole candidate to answer the question of where this line originated.

Still, there is ample documentation to bring this line all the way back to the founding ancestor who—best I can tell—arrived in America in the mid 1700s. That's a long wait until finding the proverbial ancestor who "just got off the boat."

In the meantime, I've gathered lots of documentation on all the descendants of my mother-in-law's father, John Ambrose Flowers. And his father, Joseph E. Flowers. And his father, Simon Flowers. And his father, Joseph S. Flowers. And even then, I'd still be researching family living in Perry County, Ohio.

Why? Because they were some of the first families to have settled in the new state of Ohio in the early 1800s.

Before that point, the Flowers family had edged their way westward through the state of Pennsylvania. They likely arrived on the continent via the port at Philadelphia—but that is something I've yet to verify. All in good time.

Marrying into that Perry County, Ohio, Flowers line were women from surnames familiar to those in the area, for all were longstanding members of that tight-knit Catholic community. Complicating matters were details such as the spelling of some German-heritage names, such as Snider. Is it Snider? Or Snyder? Or Schneider? Any of the three, if you believe all the census enumerators.

Or perhaps all those Snider-sounding surnames were not part of the same extended family. There is that possibility, as we'll see tomorrow when I review the maternal side of my mother-in-law's family. While Snider married into my mother-in-law's paternal side of the family, I've run across some Sniders on her mother's side of the equation, as well.

Same goes for Gordon, another surname showing up in multiple places on that family tree.

In addition, there are some other surnames joining up with the Flowers line for which I've still not obtained the full story. These include Eckhardt, Rinehart, and Stine.

And Ambrose. Remember the man whose name started off this whole genealogy? John Ambrose Flowers? You may have thought Ambrose was simply an unusual middle name. Perhaps it was. But it also was a surname handed down through the family, as well, owing to two Ambrose sisters who married two of the Flowers brothers, back in Pennsylvania—another surname with a long family history to trace.

Families like these make genealogy simpler. They stayed together, predictably. When they moved—and that was rarely—they traveled in a large party. Though they are not as definable as such endogamous groups as the Acadians, they surely bear some of the same hallmarks. Living for generations in the same, rural, isolated communities, they surely ended up intermarrying over the generations. If I knew more about administering DNA projects, I think they would make a fascinating study.

In the meantime, it is family historians like me who benefit from such predictable tendencies as theirs.