"Nothing to See Here"

 

"Move along now; nothing to see here" may be a cliche from old cop movies, but it might fit quite nicely for an end-of-month predicament with my latest genealogical detective work. I'm not finding anything further on my research goal—immigrant Nicholas Snider—despite persistent effort.

Yes, today I did take the time to trawl through the baptismal records from Conewago Chapel in search of any Sniders—or those many other spelling permutations of the surname—living in Adams County, Pennsylvania, at the same time as my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas. Did I find anything of significance? Short answer: no.

Despite the abysmal handwriting which scrawled out the information I was seeking, I managed to find a mere five other couples with the surname Snider (or spelling variations) living in Adams County who also attended the church where Nicholas had his children baptized. One of the baptisms I found was likely too early to have happened while Nicholas and his family were there. Another was too late, since by then Nicholas had moved his family west to Ohio. But there were two baptisms within the time frame which would be just right.

The first entry was a baptism for Joseph "Shneider" on September 24, 1797. Though the handwriting was challenging to read, my best guess is that the parents were Antonii (?) and Catharina. Sponsors for this baby were also Shneiders, but again the handwriting challenged me to guess: Antonius and Carlara (?).

The latest entry was for a son of Francis Snyder and his wife Elizabeth Rhineheart, who was baptized on October 29, 1817. By then, our Nicholas would be heading west, so I didn't expect to see his name listed as godparent. However, the surname of the godparents looked like "Khune"—which I doubt was correct—but certainly not any variation on the name Snider.

But what about the other two baptisms? A Catharina Shneider, baptized on June 4, 1801—again, likely before Nicholas arrived in this country—was the daughter of Peter and Catherine. What encouraged me to dig deeper was the name of the godparents: Martin and Catherine Gossman. Well, I'm assuming that surname was Gossman; it was written with the double "s" style of handwriting prevalent at the time; otherwise it would appear to be Gofman. At any rate, Gossman has been a surname that has intermarried with later generations of Nicholas Snider's descendants, something to follow up on when I revisit this research questions.

The final possibility for baptisms showing other possible kin to our Nicholas would be the January 3, 1816, baptism of Sara Shneider, daughter of John and Elizabeth Reinhard Shneider. This date might be within the timeframe before Nicholas and his family moved away from Adams County, so I was hoping to find something when I read the sponsors' names, but no luck here. The godparents named were John and Apolonia Becher.

Looking again at the godparents' names for Nicholas' own children yielded no clues, either. After these few attempts, I began wishing for the same search capabilities as I've found for the Irish baptismal records I've used in researching my father-in-law's roots. There, it was possible to search for godparents' names as well as the child's name or the parents' names. I'd be curious to see if Nicholas and his wife Anna Elizabeth had been named as godparents for anyone else in the Conewago Chapel records, if for nothing else than to build their F.A.N. Club listings.

Tomorrow will be one more chance to find Nicholas Snider in early records during his first days after arriving in this country from Germany. Whether I can find an actual document containing his name in passenger records, I'm not sure. But we'll give it one more try before we wrap up and move along. 

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Belated D N A Day

 

National DNA Day has come and gone, and I didn't even take the time to wish you a happy one this April 25. Some genetic genealogy companies chose to celebrate the occasion by offering sales through the weekend on their testing products. As for me and my house, we opted to celebrate by taking a walk on the beach. No reason in particular, though perhaps being close to the ocean has been bred into my genes. Oh, and my husband did wear a genetic genealogy T-shirt to breakfast at the hotel, a little gift from a long-past conference hosted in Houston by Family Tree DNA.

Right now, the fact that my husband's autosomal DNA test has yielded me over twenty thousand DNA matches to sort through and catalog, I confess I'm in need of a vacation. Granted, the only DNA matches who really count are those hovering around the fourth cousin mark or closer. For those, I struggle with only 1,420 matches—and not all of those are connected to my mother-in-law's lines.

Granted, the 265 DNA matches who are specific descendants of her second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider are the ones concerning me this month. And even though those matches are laid out clearly by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool—only fifty one more to go!—it can be a slog to run through each name and accurately document that match's relationship.

Now that I'm trying out Ancestry's Pro Tools, that ThruLines project is only the start. Next will be a thorough examination of the shared matches revealed by Pro Tools to see if there are any other clues to dig through on this family's hidden mysteries from generations back. Yet, with only four more days to go in this month, this appears to be a daunting project. And I still don't know much more about Nicholas Snider's roots than I did when I started this month.

There are some months when the selected project from my Twelve Most Wanted for the year reveal the answers I've been seeking. Other months, well, I have to make concluding notes and button up the task for another year's attempt at solving the mystery. Though it is clear that learning more about the local history of Adams County, Pennsylvania, may be enlightening, this may turn out to be a belated situation of more project than month in which to accomplish it.

Speaking of FAN Clubs . . .

 

It wasn't long after I had written, last Tuesday, about using F.A.N. Club research techniques to ferret out who, among Nicholas Snider's neighbors in Adams County, Pennsylvania, might have been fellow immigrants from Germany, when I received an offer I couldn't refuse. There on my screen was a banner posted from Ancestry.com, offering one month's free trial to their Pro Tools. Could I use that to help pursue my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor and his F.A.N. Club? You betcha.

Granted, I had long thought about springing for Ancestry.com's Pro Tools. I had first heard about their Pro Tools development from DNA researchers, who mainly focused on Ancestry's "Enhanced Shared Matches" mainly because it provides a research boost similar to the tools we once had at 23andMe before their security woes initiated their long spiral downwards (at least from a user's perspective).

But listening to fellow genealogical society members who at the first had sprung for the additional subscription cost at Ancestry gave me pause. Some felt the tree checker and accuracy ratings were more stress-inducing than helpful. The bottom line was something like this one friend's sentiment: "Well, I'll try it out for a while, just to see what it's like, but then cancel the subscription." For me, that equated to a wait and see message.

Granted, the boost to DNA matching is a big plus. I can see how some of those multiple dozens of DNA cousins who never made the cut to ThruLines recognition could still be pencilled in to my trees, simply by examining shared matches' strength of relationship to key known relatives among my DNA cousins. My half-brother's daughter, for instance, makes an automatic connector to my paternal line, as does my mother's cousin to my maternal grandmother's line, leading to clues I otherwise would not have, since Pro Tools offers a way to see shared matches and determine how closely they might be related, not only to me, but to each other.

But it is not only DNA for which that new Ancestry tool set catches my research imagination. Their Pro Tools include a network creation option. Granted, that option is still in a beta phase, so it might not be available to every subscriber who opts for the additional cost of Ancestry Pro Tools. But here's what I see, specifically pertinent to this month's research project, finding family connections for my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider. I want to know: for the brief time his family lived in Adams County, Pennsylvania, after arriving from Germany, did he live with relatives? Did he travel with a F.A.N. Club or cluster of people known to him from life in his native Germany?

I've been exploring possible connections to the other Snyders listed in Adams County for the one census in which Nicholas appeared: the 1810 census. Now that I'm using Pro Tools, Ancestry.com has made a provision for just that: a work space for creating networks of neighbors or associates who might not turn out to be family.

In other words, I now have a genealogical sandbox to play in as I dabble with the neighborly connections Nicholas Snider and his wife and children may have made during the decade in which they stopped in Pennsylvania before moving on to their final dwelling place in Perry County, Ohio. I've already created one network which I've labeled Snyders at Conewago Chapel, the church where some of Nicholas' children were baptized. And I'll use that network sandbox once again to explore Snyder listings throughout that 1810 census for all of Adams County, not just the Mount Pleasant location where Nicholas was enumerated.

Starting this week, I'll have a month to decide whether it's yay or nay for Ancestry.com's Pro Tools. And I have less than a week remaining to work on this Twelve Most Wanted project for April, so it's really time to get busy and see whether Pro Tools can give me the boost I need to build out Nicholas Snider's F.A.N. Club network.   

Assembling Shards of Identity

Imagine, for a moment, participating in an archaeological dig and finding a sliver of pottery. Though its broken edges are rough, one side seems smooth, and even bears the faint outline of a design. Could this be part of something bigger? Sifting through the surrounding rubble, you try to find a similar piece. 

Eventually, several such pieces get revealed through the silt of ages. It's time to gently brush them off and examine them closer. Could they fit together?

That, sometimes, is how I feel about the process of viewing the minuscule segments of matching genetic material, brought to light only when two people--unknowingly, distant relatives--coincidentally purchase a test at the same DNA company. Somehow, unseen hands know how to brush off the extraneous genetic layers added through generations, to focus on the details revealing our specific familial connection.

Equally invisible processes sift through countless family trees to spot a run of two or three names here, a connection to the next generation there, to piece together a pedigree chart connecting distant cousins. Get one step of the pathway wrong and the sign leading the way now leads astray. Run into a forest of family trees which unanimously stop at that same brick wall ancestor, and the way pointers no longer speak to us.

That's how I've been feeling, lately, about pursuing Nicholas Snider's roots. Yes, he showed up in Pennsylvania from—supposedly—Germany, but it's almost as if he had landed in Adams County by being dropped there by space aliens. As I sift through tokens of his identity, I feel as if I've been grasping for shards from an archaeological dig, unsure whether I'd find anything—and even if I did find something, unsure of what, exactly, it means. No search tool like Ancestry's ThruLines or MyHeritage's Theory of Family Relativity is pointing the way, because no way has yet been proposed, much less proven.

This is when we move into an experimental role. Granted, I'll still be examining all those DNA matches—eighteen more to go on Peter Snider's forty descendants who match my husband, then twenty two matches for Nicholas Snider's youngest son Conrad—but taking my cue from archaeologists sifting through the layers of time, I've got to broaden my search parameters. And welcome even the slightest shard I find. After all, it might turn out to be just the clue I've needed.

Concerning Conrad

 

There was something compelling about discovering that name, Conrad Snyder. Sure, that was a man who lived in the same county in Pennsylvania as my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Snider—and it wasn't lost on me that Nicholas had named a son of his own by that same given name. But trying to flesh out more of the elder Conrad's story from an 1810 census just wasn't yielding enough information.

After all, the age brackets used for those early American enumerations could sometimes be a bit too generous. If you think that giving the age of a son as "under ten years" can be befuddling, let's just say it  doesn't help to pin an identity on the head of a large household by simply saying he was forty five or older. 

Older? How much older?

The Conrad Snyder I found in Adams County, Pennsylvania—living in the same township where Nicholas once lived—could have been forty five. Or forty six. Or fifty six. Or much older.

I did the math. Even if Conrad had been forty five at the time of the 1810 census, that would have meant a birth year of 1765. Every year older than that would push that date of birth earlier. Hmmm. Doing a bit more math, I realized the man's age could have had him hovering around a serviceable age for a significant date in American history: the American Revolutionary War.

Could this Conrad have been of a right age to have served in the war? I popped over to the website of the Daughters of the American Revolution to check. Sure enough, there were three Patriots listed in their files with that name—and all three of them served from Pennsylvania.

The first entry, a man who served as a captain in the army, was for someone born in Germany, a promising sign—until I realized he died by 1802. No appearance in the 1810 census for him.

The second entry—also a man who was born in Germany—brought back memories of the family story we had found earlier this month about Nicholas supposedly serving as a drummer boy during the war. Could this actually have been a story about a relative of Nicholas, mistakenly borrowed and ascribed to Nicholas, himself? After all, here was a man named Conrad Snyder, who had that same scenario ascribed to him. I was tempted to revisit that story we had run across.

But the third DAR entry seemed the most similar to what I had seen in the census entry—yet frustratingly an entry not quite cooperating with the scenario I had assumed would have been Nicholas' own story. Here was a man born about the same time as Nicholas—handy, for the possibility that this Conrad and Nicholas could have been brothers—and dying in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

That's where the similarities stopped short. This Conrad was said to have been born in Pennsylvania, not Germany. Worse, there may even be problems with his service record, providing us with less information on his biography than I would have hoped. About the only helpful detail on that man's DAR entry was that it provided the date of his death in Adams County—March 25, 1837.

Now having a date of death for this Conrad, it might be possible to examine his will—if he had one—to see what we can learn about his family constellation. While this research path may turn out to be a rabbit trail, at least it will be one we can set aside, knowing we have done what we could to examine the possibilities.  

Family and/or Neighbors

 

One way to pinpoint a mystery ancestor's place in the family line—especially immigrant ancestors—is to look for the "F.A.N. Club" that traveled with him. In the case of Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, the first place where I can find any possible family, associates, or traveling neighbors after his arrival in America would be in Adams County, Pennsylvania. 

Specifically, Nicholas Snider and his family lived there from the early 1800s through some time before 1820, when the Sniders appeared in the census for Perry County, Ohio.

So who else lived in Adams County in 1810 who might have had the same Snider surname? In the case of that particular census, all heads of household with that surname had it spelled Snyder for that enumeration, but I made note of all with that surname who lived in the same township as our Nicholas: Mount Pleasant Township.

There were actually two households claiming that surname besides Nicholas. One, appearing to be a young family, was headed up by someone named John Snyder—a generic name which doesn't reveal much of anything. The other household, however, looks a bit more promising.

That household was headed by someone named Conrad Snyder. I lit up as soon as I considered that prospect, because at the end of the long list of names bestowed on Nicholas' many sons was that same name: Conrad. 

This Conrad, listed in the 1810 census for Adams County, seemed to be an older man with a large family. Included in the enumeration were two sons under ten years of age, another one between the ages of ten and fifteen, and two more between the ages of sixteen and twenty five. Conrad, himself, was categorized as forty five years of age or older, and was joined by a slightly younger wife and seven daughters—in all, a household of fourteen people.

Well? Could Conrad have been Nicholas Snider's father? This is not clear. At age forty five or older, Conrad would have been born in 1765 or earlier. Nicholas himself was born about that same time—1766, according to some notes, though I've yet to find any verification. However, when we found Nicholas in the 1810 census, he had a far younger family than Conrad appeared to have at that time. Since the 1810 census doesn't specify ages above forty five, we can't really be sure whether this was a father-son or sibling relationship without further information.