It's Still a Tapestry

 

Sometimes I forget how interwoven a family tree can get—until I return to work on my mother-in-law's family. Then I'm reminded that hers is not a pedigree chart—it's a tapestry. Those strands get woven together, over and over.

This past weekend, I was reminded once again that this family is still a tapestry. Working on the descendants of Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather (well, depending on how you calculate it), I ran into a name which seemed vaguely familiar.

Make that déjà vu familiar. I'd seen that name before. Sure enough, checking the index for names already entered into her family tree, there were two entries for that same name, complete with matching details. Time to merge duplicates. 

No, make that times two. Soon, there were even more. Some duplicates had their roots two or more generations back. Who knew that the family line I built out a few years ago would develop loose ends that didn't find their family match until now?

And so, I weave in another branch of the family—or, more correctly, weave it back in, once again, to an unexpected place in the ever-bushier tree. With pedigree collapse, you come to expect that issue will pop up—once or twice. But with this "endogamy lite" tree, it is smart policy to keep checking for duplicates. After all, I can't be expected to remember everything about a family tree approaching forty thousand names.

This brings up a policy question. For such a situation, when I enter DNA matches by their specific relationships, such as can be done at Ancestry.com, which of two or more relationships do I note? At first, I tried listing both relationship pathways for DNA matches, but had given up when the process became tedious. However, if anyone is using such data to help hone DNA predictions for future use, my input might skew any conclusions drawn from my entries.

So many of the strands in this ever-growing tree can be tied into the bigger picture in more ways than one. I'm not sure why I find that humorous, but I do. This tree does not lack for unexpected connections.

With the break over the weekend for the Easter holiday now past, it will be back to work on Nicholas Snider's descendants to map out the DNA connections—the behind-the-scenes grunt work that embodies the entertainment value of watching sausages being made. But it is time to get back to exploring those old documents from his time period to see if I can pinpoint any other Snider relatives—or at least members of his "F.A.N. Club" who made the journey with him from his home back in Germany. Somebody out there has got to have a connection noted to our founding immigrant Nicholas Snider.

A Pause to Reflect

 

Today is Easter—even in the Greek Orthodox tradition, an unusual coinciding of western and eastern Christian calendars. I always welcome this day as a pause to reflect on what is most meaningful to me. Whether you call it Resurrection Day or simply celebrate it as a chance to enjoy spring weather outdoors, I hope you are able to enjoy some meaningful time with family.

In 1904, The Tacoma Times published this repeating icon of bells and lilies across the front page of their April 2 edition of the newspaper to commemorate Easter. The artwork is preserved via Wikimedia from the digital copy of the newspaper edition at the U.S. Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection. In the public domain.

It's Easy — After all the Hard Work is Done

 

There is no doubt that preparation makes a job flow much more smoothly. If I had any doubt that planning and preparation had any place in working through the thousands of DNA matches I've received, I'm a firm believer now. Building out a "bushy" family tree, including collateral lines—and all their descendants—may have been a lot of work, but it paved the way so I wouldn't get swamped with all the matches that piled up in my family's accounts over the last twelve years.

Right now, as I work my way through the ThruLines list of the forty—no, make that thirty eight as of today—DNA matches descending from Nicholas Snider's son Peter, I'm finding it to be a smooth process if I had already attached that line of descendants to my mother-in-law's tree. See? It's easy, at least after all the hard work has been done.

There are other descendants of Peter Snider whom I had missed the first time I did the preparation work on this tree. That meant, of course, that I had to stop and hunt for documents to verify the assertion being made by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. After all, a mistake repeated in hundreds of family trees would still be a mistake, so I don't just want to copy what everyone else had said, even though ThruLines picked it up, too. I want to see some verification that the connection is so.

Yes, it all adds up to hard work, but that is an investment in time well worth the effort. Now, when I receive a new DNA match, especially one outlined on Ancestry's ThruLines or at MyHeritage's Theory of Family Relativity, I've already got the basic structure laid in place, and can just follow the map the genealogy company has outlined for me.

The whole point behind using DNA for genealogy is not just to build a bushy tree, of course. It's to help us figure out a way around those brick wall ancestors who have us stumped. I've already seen that while working on other lines in our family, and I'm hoping that will stand me in good stead for this pursuit of Nicholas Snider's roots. He was my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather. While I am testing her son's DNA for these purposes, a third great-grandfather's descendants are still somewhat within reach to hopefully glean helpful information about the Snider roots. More than halfway through the process of examining all these Snider DNA matches, we should have the verdict on this project soon.

Top Down and Bottom Up

 

Many descendants from one ancestral couple can lead to duplicate entries in the family tree if you keep at it long enough. In the case of Nicholas and Anna Elizabeth Snider, whose many sons' grandchildren ended up marrying their distant cousins, some pedigree collapse may have blindsided me.

Working a family tree from the founding ancestor forward for DNA purposes, rather than the usual tree-building approach of starting with oneself and moving backwards through the generations, can result in duplicate entries. Ask me; I know.

I've always known that my mother-in-law's family tree had many intermarriages. As far as I've been able to trace her roots—back to immigrants arriving in the American colonies, in some instances—I've been able to spot such instances. In one particular case, for which I rib my husband that he's his own seventh cousin, a Gordon ancestor ended up marrying three times, two of which marriages produced multiple children. Fast forward a few more generations and move to a different state, and subsequent romances blossom unwittingly into marriages between third cousins. Who knew?

A genealogist knows, of course. And now that my focus has turned to the descendants of Nicholas Snider, I'm seeing this pattern repeated. While I work my mother-in-law's tree traditionally—back from her generation to her parents, then grandparents—I add siblings, then follow those collateral lines back down to the present time. Along the way, the children of those collateral lines marry—but I don't know who the spouse is, except to note the name and perhaps a date of birth, or maybe even the parents' names.

Along comes a Snider DNA match, and ThruLines paints the way from founding immigrant Nicholas Snider to the current generation. I trace the pathway, recording each step of the way and linking the documents to the family tree. And bingo! There pops up a notice on my Ancestry.com tree that I've already entered that document for another someone who, strangely, has the same name. Checking it out, sure enough, it turns out to be a duplicate entry. On this tree, I've come both ways—down from the past and upwards from the present—and meet in the middle with two names which represent one person. Instant downsizing of the family tree.

It's always nice to learn the rest of the story on a family's line, of course—not to mention, see this bushy tree get modestly pruned. Best of all is to link those DNA matches to their proper place in the family tree. But somehow, I just wish I had spotted a clear path, from beginning to end, sooner. I guess it takes all kinds of input to shape up an accurate picture of the extended family—top down and bottom up.

Simon's Sixty Done

 

Some goals may seem do-able, while others seem to keep us running as fast as we can. Today's goal was one of the latter: I wanted to complete the review of the sixty DNA matches linked to the descendants of Nicholas Snider's son Simon.

Reviewing those sixty matches brought up some thoughts. The prime observation had to do with pedigree collapse. In my mother-in-law's case—and this exercise is solely because of her history in Perry County, Ohio—her roots were quite tangled. I know the proper term for that might be pedigree collapse—think cousin marrying cousin, for instance—but in her case, I prefer to call it "endogamy lite." 

In the case of some of these Snider DNA matches, they are cousins several times over. Some of them were related to my mother-in-law's line through five or six different surnames from her past. That's just what happens when a small community stays in one place for two hundred years.

The purpose of reviewing these Snider DNA matches involved not only the process of linking each DNA match to my mother-in-law's tree, but updating each relative's profile page with links to documents. Some of these people, for instance, had been added to the family tree long before the 1950 census had been released, so an update was necessary. Then, too, marriage announcements in newspapers and other records found during this process allowed me to make many more profiles in my mother-in-law's family tree current.

With that goal completed, it's simply on to the next goal. While I've already added all the DNA matches for Nicholas' children Jacob, Lewis, Joseph, Maria, and Simon, there are three more categories of Snider DNA matches yet to conquer. The good news is that the remaining number of Snider matches is seventy seven—a far less daunting number than the 268 that appeared on my ThruLines readout when I first began this process.

With that, I'll move on to the DNA matches linked to Nicholas' son Peter tomorrow—a mere forty matches after all that's been done so far. 

To See it With my Own Eyes

 

What is it about documents for family history? Somehow, I can't just accept that someone else saw it, or transcribed it, or referenced it. I need to see the thing for myself. And that is simply not happening for Nicholas Snider, the second great-grandfather I'm seeking on my mother-in-law's family tree.

Granted, the man was likely born in in the mid-1760s and made his trip from Germany to a very young United States of America in the early 1800s when record-keeping was not our nation's bureaucratic strong suit. Whatever records might have survived—if even required to be taken, much less kept for centuries—would certainly not be of a format we'd expect today.

Though I had already read reports, thanks to Ancestry.com, that Nicholas had arrived in 1804 on the ship Fortune, I wanted to see the actual passenger list. So naturally, I was excited to learn that there was a digitized collection at FamilySearch.org called Pennsylvania Landing Reports of Aliens, 1798-1828. I was not so delighted to learn the collection—all 636 images—is not searchable. But you can browse.

From the transcription, I noticed that the Nicholas in that ship's entry had traveled with Anna, presumably his wife, and a five year old son named Jacob. Their surname was spelled Schneider, no surprise for a family traveling from Germany, although our Nicholas' family eventually went by the more English spelling, Snider or Snyder. Along with Nicholas' entry in the passenger record were entries for two unnamed children, aged three and one, who were marked as dead.

But were these the entries for the right Nicholas Schneider family? That was my impetus for finding the original record, in case any other information might have been provided. In addition, slight changes to details I had found—such as Nicholas' wife's name being Anna Elizabeth, which doesn't fit a middle initial "M" from the transcription—urge me to find more information.

Whether I have the fortitude to last through all 636 images in the collection, I can't yet say. I suspect, given the size, I'll find a spot which is safely within the date range of that 1804 transcription, and go page by page through that section. And hope. The FamilySearch wiki entry for the collection doesn't give much more guidance; sometimes you just have to turn the pages for yourself.

Searching Through Adams County Records

 

Tracing Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, as we go backwards in time can be a trying proposition. We've already discovered other men by that name in the early 1800s around the vicinity of Pennsylvania, so spotting that Snider name—or its variant spellings—in Adams County doesn't necessarily mean I've found the right man. Until I'm prepared to zero in on the right candidate, it seems a wise approach would be to glean more background information on not just the man, but the history—and historical resources—of the region during the time when I spotted him there: the 1810 census.

Since Nicholas' descendants, once they moved westward to Perry County, Ohio, were connected to the local Catholic Church there, it seems reasonable that they would have attended the same religious body while living in their previous home in Pennsylvania. Indeed, there was a Catholic church established in Adams County, known as the Conewago Chapel. And thanks to some notes at the FamilySearch wiki for available church records in Adams County, Pennsylvania, we can see those records reach back to 1790.

Besides baptismal records, though, I was curious to see what other ways I could track Nicholas Snider during his stay in Adams County. The good news for this, according to the FamilySearch wiki for Adams County, is that court records and land records date back to 1800. Added bonus: no courthouse fires to spoil my fun!

While attaining records from 1800 may not seem like much of a bonus, given my research goal of finding Nicholas Snider's origin and having found his appearance in the 1810 census already, I am fairly certain all I will need to work on would be that ten year span of time. Reason I'm sure: later census records indicate Nicholas' oldest son Jacob was born in Germany about 1799. All surviving children after that point were said to have been born in either Pennsylvania or Maryland before the family's arrival in Ohio.

For those ten years, possible searches could be made of land records in Adams County, which thankfully are available to view at FamilySearch from 1800 onward. In addition, I'll be searching for tax records attached to Nicholas Snider's residence there. But the main discovery of resources I'll be interested in is the collection at FamilySearch called "Landing Reports of Aliens, 1798-1828." No title could have fit my search parameters more closely.