Oh-Oh!

There are some times, when doing genealogical research, that you may use one resource to ascertain the date of an important event—say, a marriage—and then when you return to check things out later, you find that other documents act like they don’t know what you’re talking about.

While I’m reconstructing the long path that connects my husband and his family with their ancestors who arrived in Ohio before 1821, I can’t say that the itinerary has facilitated smooth sailing. We’ve already seen that in my quest to find the smoking gun for ancestor Simon Flowers. And when we switched gears to research Simon Snider’s family, we’ve already bumped up against sloppy record-keeping by the very government officials tasked with keeping the record straight.

Well, the way-back trip isn’t over yet.

Enter the one daughter of Simon and Nancy Johnson-er-Jackson Snider who connects us with the newer generation: Emily Catherine Snider. Since she was born prior to the advent of governmental birth records, there are no such records concurrently drawn up for her specific date of birth. We can generally estimate the year of her arrival from census records. If we want something more specific, we have to take her family’s word for it or rely on the good graces of the parish where she was raised. Or we can hope that the reporting party on her death certificate didn’t let the moment’s somber circumstances sway accurate recall of essential information.

If the record on Emily’s death certificate was correct, she was born in Perry County on October 22, 1843.

That may be the simple part of this genealogical reconstruction of Emily’s life. Well…along with the date of her death, which occurred well past the year in which the state of Ohio mandated governmental records. That date, we can be fairly certain, was August 11, 1915.

It is the squishy innards of the sandwich of her life that deserves questioning. Oh, not the part listing the names of her children—though I sometimes even struggle with that. It’s the circumstances of her marriage record that give me pause.

I’ve always assumed that Emily Catherine Snider married a man by the name of Adam Gordon, and that the date of the event was May 31, 1864. The wedding, I assumed, took place in their home town in Perry County. After all, that was what was reported in Male Index to Marriages—Perry County, Ohio. On a website where the book is scanned and freely accessible (well, all except for the frustration of having to scroll through the “G” section to the bottom of page 34), the very last entry states that Adam Gordon and Emily “Snyder” had their marriage record entered in book four on page 297.

It’s a good thing I had made note of that page number, for yesterday I attempted finding the scanned image of the actual marriage license. After all, the other day I had found the book containing Simon and Nancy Snider’s 1841 marriage record at FamilySearch. Why not check out the volume containing the more recent 1864 records?

Of course, the Perry County records don’t seem to be indexed on FamilySearch yet. That means searching by the hunt-and-peck method. You see now why I’m overjoyed that I knew the volume and page numbers.

Okay, so I’ll cut to the chase here. I do the back-and-forth samba to locate the right image number at FamilySearch, and pull up volume four, page number 297. And I find them at the top of the left-hand page.

Well, let me amend that statement: I find their names in the margin. As to the body of the record, may I put it mildly that I am stunned to find the entry blank?

Yes, blank.

Oh oh.

What the record stated in the margin was:

May 24, A. D. 1864

Marriage License

Was this day granted to

Adam Gordon

And

Emily Snyder

The entry was then signed by someone who had indistinguishable handwriting, but who evidently was serving as a Probate Judge.

And here is what is interesting about this entry: under the judge’s signature, there is a handwritten addendum. It is merely the phrase, “vouched for.” Then there is another name, which looks vaguely like J. J. Johnson.

As for the rest of the form—you know, the usual stuff that starts out, “Personally came___applying for License for____to be married to____...”—well, that part was left clean. Not even an ink spot to fill in any of those blanks. Nada.

Needless to say, the “return” portion didn’t contain much more ink than that, either.

So, what did the mysterious Mr. Johnson vouch for? That Adam and Emily were married? I hope so. Emily Catherine Snider and Adam Gordon did, after all, live a long life together, have several children of their own, and produce one child who ultimately became my husband’s great-grandmother.

I know that, of course. But my word doesn’t serve as standard proof to satisfy boards inspecting documentation to verify lineage.

While the clock is ticking away, the calendar pages flying by on their approach to December 31, this is no time to stumble over another road block. It’s almost as if someone is saying, “You can’t get there from here.” Yet, maddeningly, I know I should be able to. This is not a remote, distant history I’m talking about here. It’s our family—but try telling someone else that!

Simon’s Sizable Family

While genealogical pursuits take the researcher from the point of “Now” and work backwards to “Then,” in this grand tour of our First Families of Ohio candidate, I’m taking the opposite approach by following the timeline down to the present from way back when. Can that be called swimming against the tide? Is swimming upstream swimming against the flow of time—or against the tendency of genealogy research?

Never mind all this philosophical talk…let’s get down to examining the generation following Simon Snider and his wife Nancy Jackson Snider—no matter which direction it takes.

While we are still in the era of that governmental-records no-man’s-land, devoid of birth or death certificates to provide that handy who-what-where-when-how guide, at least from 1850 on, we can find census listings of the Sniders’ children’s names. Let’s take a tour of that now, since soon we will be moving to the next generation as we link First Families pioneer with current-day descendants.

Not long after Simon and Nancy were wed in 1841, they were blessed with their first child. A daughter, Mary Elizabeth, was received into their home nineteen days shy of their first anniversary. In advance of celebration for their second anniversary, Simon and Nancy welcomed daughter number two, Emily Catherine.

With the advent of daughter number three in January 1845, I’m sure Simon was despairing of ever having any sons to carry the family name. He must have been relieved to welcome Joseph Edwin Snider on September 18, 1846—though that joy was to be short-lived, as the family lost their son four years later.

However, by that time, the Sniders had already been blessed with a second son, named after his paternal grandfather, arriving in 1848. Not to be outdone, the maternal grandfather was honored with a namesake shortly after New Year in 1850—the year of the first census to include this new family unit.

In the 1850 census, Simon and Nancy and the complete family of six children (Joseph had not yet died) show in the record for Reading Township in Perry County, Ohio.

But they are not finished yet.

By the 1860 census, this good Catholic family saw their ranks grow to include a total of ten children—and that was after the loss, that same year, of yet another son, Lyman Francis. Perhaps it is no surprise to notice the familiar name of J. J. Jackson—most likely Nancy Snider’s father—arriving at the household next door to the Sniders in time for this census. And—sign of things yet to come—the household on the other side of the Snider farm bearing the Overmyer name of a future son-in-law…and daughter-in-law.

Before the next census in 1870, the Snider family added yet another two daughters: Rosanna and Nancy Ann. However, that decade also saw the family lose their patriarch, as Simon passed away in 1867.

All told—at least according to widow Nancy’s report much later in the 1900 census—Simon and Nancy were the proud parents of fourteen children, eight of whom survived to report on that turn-of-the-century document.

The eleven children of the Snider household who survived to adulthood, with the exception of one, went on to marry and have large families of their own. At least four of them emigrated from Ohio to Iowa, and one moved in the opposite direction, settling in West Virginia.

One small token of appreciation for the legacy left by Simon and Nancy Snider may very well be that of the well-kept grave stone that serves to mark their memory. It stands in the Holy Trinity Cemetery in Somerset, Ohio, not far from the farm that was the lifelong family home.


Photograph, above right: Simon and Nancy Jackson Snider; courtesy of a fellow Snider family researcher; used by permission.
 

The Perfect Wedding

There is no day so anticipated in the life of a young woman as the day of her wedding. All hopes and energies are focused on creating the perfect occasion—that flawless day to be cherished and remembered forever by the blissful couple. When you are in love, how could anything go wrong?

I don’t suppose, when one is contemplating the execution of a wedding, that one would consider the earliest opportunity for things going wrong to be the marriage record. After all, the couple said, “I do.” What more is necessary?

And yet, we sometimes hear stories of marriage licenses someone failed to return to the proper civil authorities, or some other paperwork nightmare.

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t suppose what happened in the case of Simon Snider and his bride-to-be, Nancy Jackson, is entirely earth-shattering. Perhaps the newlyweds never even realized what became of their marriage record.

For us, though—the genealogy hunters par excellence who document every step of the family history trail—a little stutter in the marriage record for Simon and Nancy Snider does not go unnoticed.

Though we pursue thorough documentation, we need to keep in mind that not everything is set in stone—not even gravestones, for instance. I’ve seen our ancestors’ names carved in stone—complete with misspellings. Take my husband’s great-great grandfather, John Stevens, buried under a proud monument bearing the legend, “John Steavens.” What do you do with a typo like that?!

The matter is no different for those records kept on mere paper. For some reason, back in those days, mistakes were sometimes not corrected. Maybe it’s because the error predated White-Out. Or erasers.

Or perhaps, back in 1841 when the Snider record came through the in-box at the county courthouse, the clerk was suffering from some post-luncheon malaise, wishing it were closer to five o’clock so he could beat the commute rush home.

For whatever reason, the surnames for both Simon and Nancy were correctly labeled in the margin of the thick binder where such marriage details were recorded. When it came to the body of the record itself, though, Nancy was instantly transformed from a Jackson to a Johnson.

October 25^th 1841.

            I do certify that I did on the 26^th day of October A.D. 1841 solemnize the marriage of Simon Snider and Nancy Johnson.

            Given under my hand this 26^th day of October 1841

                        N. D. Young.

Which will it be for us researchers one hundred seventy one years later? Nancy Jackson? Or Nancy Johnson? Both surnames are included in the entry. Upon which entry did the clerk suddenly get caught away in a daydream?

Not that transcriptions of original documents provide dependable assurance of correct data, but I did note that the record had it “right” in inserting Jackson in the Male Index to Marriages—Perry County (which you can see with your own eyes, if you care to scroll through the alphabetized entries here). However, I’d feel a bit more certain of this discovery if I could find another original source for confirmation.

Why would all this matter, you ask?

Simple: I have my eye on young Nancy Jackson. She, it turns out, carries a double bonus for this roots hunter.

Remember my family’s whirlwind trip to the genealogy section of the Allen County Public Library last summer? It was during that time, while I focused on my D.A.R. application via my maternal line, that my husband dove into researching his maternal connection to First Families of Ohio status.

Somewhere in the midst of that hasty library visit, my husband stumbled upon some interesting trivia about Simon Snider’s bride: she was the daughter of a military man—and possibly the granddaughter of a patriot serving in the American Revolutionary War.

While we are still in the process of checking the record for ourselves, what we’ve seen so far looks promising—until, of course, I run into enigmatic “documentation” such as this clerk’s slip of the pen.

I’m stymied. Does this mean I need a second verification of Nancy’s surname? Where will I happen upon such proof in the midst of this no-man’s-land of public records, predating the era in which such details were duly captured by governmental officials (at least those not sleeping on the job)?

Since stumbling upon the siren call of Nancy Jackson’s double significance as both First Families of Ohio and Daughters of the American Revolution candidate, no matter what I end up doing, it will surely include serious attention to further documentation. I’ve never been so fiercely concerned about the difference between a Jackson and a Johnson before.

Funny Things Happen on the Way to Documentation

How many times have we as family historians been drilled in the necessity of documenting our sources? Okay, “blue in the face” isn’t a number, but that’s what I think genealogy webinar instructors would look like if I could see them instead of just listening in on the pitch.

Thankfully, I learned my lesson well in the case of Simon Snider, my connection to First Families of Ohio designation for my husband’s family. Years ago, I had transcribed for my own records the census report for Simon Snider and his family in 1850, complete with every detail of names, birth years—all the way down to page and line numbers of the family record.

That 1850 census, as you well know, is when the United States crossed from the enumeration Cone of Silence into that great governmental frontier of violation of personal privacy.

Or, in less radical terms, 1850 became the census year which gave people back their names—at least those in the rest of the family.

When I was writing down those family names in Simon Snider’s census record—a task surely done with such Stone Age implements as a pen and paper precariously positioned to the side of a microfilm reader—I remembered to include one simple routine. Not wishing to have to go through the excruciating pain of reeling my way through the entire county’s records again, I took down the details of state, county, and township locations. And I noted not only the page number but the line numbers for each of the household members named.

Thankfully.

Now that I’m transferring my data onto a family tree online at Ancestry.com, I’m trying to go back and clean up little messes like lack of such notation. Ancestry has this handy mechanism for attaching useful items like census records to each person’s readout. Since I was working on Simon Snider’s family yesterday, I thought I’d take care of that little housekeeping item.

I hadn’t yet attached the 1850 census record to Simon’s name, so I quickly scrolled down the page to the button labeled “Search Records” so I could get straight to the business of connecting records to names.

I can’t imagine why I was flabbergasted to not find Simon’s name in Perry County for that year. Believe me, I had no worries of somehow yet again missing the mark of achieving First Families status. I knew he was in Ohio now!

But he certainly wasn’t in the census results. At least not on Ancestry.

Not to be stymied, I scooted over to FamilySearch.org. I’d find it there for sure! And—no surprise—there it was, in Reading Township, just as I thought.

Could I somehow be missing something? I went back to my own database, looked at the notes I had stored there, wondering if my eyes had deceived me. But no, it was in Reading Township. By now, it was me and FamilySearch against Ancestry. How could Ancestry be missing something so obvious?

Ever get caught in one of those tight research loops, where you know where an item is, but though you stare at the record umpteen times, you can’t seem to find it?

Well, that’s not what this is.

It’s the reverse.

Ancestry was not staring at my item. And since I was locked in to determination’s grip by this time—never give up! (thank you, Sir Winston Churchill)—I was determined to get to the bottom of this. How could Ancestry not know this? It was plainly right there…see?!

Thankfully, Ancestry allows members to search through those scanned records on their own. They don’t insist on locking us into playing with their-search-device-or-no-game. So I took a meander through what they call their “Browse” feature. I selected 1850 census, state: Ohio, county: Perry, township: Reading.

This is where I exhibited some pre-Thanksgiving gratefulness: I had written down the page number in my records, remember? So, to page 350B, lines nine through eighteen it was.

Surprise. Simon Snider was not home. His possessions were now under the proud moniker of “Semon Swider.”

Really?

And Mr. Swider was born in Pennsylvania in 1795.

Really?

Well, I’ll be kind. I’ll grant that it was an honest take on that place of birth. The census did read “Pa” for place of birth. But the age seemed to clearly read “35” to my eyes. Not “85.”

Relieved that Simon Snider did, in fact, still exist in Ohio, I made sure to duly note my objections on Ancestry’s handy form for such issues. I’m thankful for Ancestry’s openness to crowdsourcing the right information, so others can also find records through their search engines. Otherwise, how useful would a device like the Ancestry service be?

And with that, I handily clicked the “Save” button and added that 1850 census record where it should have been all along. Simon Snider is now back on his farm and all is right with the documentation world.


Above left: Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Self Portrait, oil on canvas; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Simon Says

Piecing together family constellations from documents pre-dating the 1850 census can be challenging. As mentioned yesterday, for those families with strong church ties, baptismal and other sacramental records provide some assistance in naming children and connecting them to the proper parents. But there is another resource, in many cases: the patriarch’s last will and testament.

For Nicholas Snider, settling in Perry County, Ohio, in the early years of both the state and the county, there was also a land record—implying the need for an instrument which passed along that possession to heirs. Thankfully, in Nicholas’ case, the will does name his children as heirs—and in one case, provides me with a married name for the daughter for whom I’d previously not had any descendant records.

While the land described in the will does not match up with the patent record for Nicholas’ original purchase—a puzzle to save for another day—thankfully (again) the names mentioned in the will do align with the names of the children already in my research database.

Evidently, the youngest son of Nicholas and Elizabeth became the new owner of the family farm, perhaps something in Nicholas’ plans all along, as his first—and evidently other—Ohio land purchase was jointly acquired with his eldest son.

That youngest son, Conrad, was required in turn to disburse set sums of money to each of the other children based on a schedule outlined in the will. Nicholas’ still-single daughter Catherine was to receive the sum of four hundred dollars on the anniversary of his death. Two years following his death, that same amount of money was to be split between his sons Jacob—by then married, with a large family of his own—and Joseph. Two hundred dollars would eventually also go to another son, Lewis, the next year. And on the final year of disbursements, three hundred dollars would be received by his daughter Mary—the added sesquicentennial-plus bonus for us researchers, in reading this will, being that we receive record of that same daughter’s married identity as Mrs. Elder.

There is one more name to be mentioned in Nicholas Snider’s will: that of his son Simon. On the bottom of the same page detailing the schedule of disbursements from Nicholas’ estate, he concludes with these final instructions: “I do hereby appoint my Son Simon Snider as my Executor….”

At some point in the year 1856, Nicholas Snider finished his course and Simon Snider assumed the role his father had appointed for him, ordering the settlement of the estate. Nicholas was buried on March 26, 1856, in Somerset, Ohio, in the Holy Trinity Cemetery. And thanks to the property he once had purchased in the early years of Ohio statehood, the required records outlining his wishes in how that property was to be disposed also served to provide future generations with a record of his family constellation.

Taking a Tour of the Family Constellation

Finding Nicholas Schneider cum Snider, the immigrant who found a new lease on life—and a new spelling for his surname—in the pioneer territory of Ohio was indeed encouraging. It invigorated my First Families of Ohio search, and I’m thankful for the pre-1821 documentation in existence online. There is, actually, precious little else that was documented back in that time period.

So, how to piece together the family constellation to assure our family’s link to this early Ohio settler?

There are resources. Some of them are anecdotal, like a few vague references to the family in biographical sketches (such as the one accessed by scrolling to the bottom of the page here). Some are incomplete—for instance, the 1850 census record, in which both Nicholas and his wife are still living on their Hopewell Township property, but at which point, they are too aged to have all their children still living with them.

Because most of Nicholas and Elizabeth’s children died before the state of Ohio required county Probate Courts to maintain records of deaths, there is little opportunity even to reconstruct the names of their children through such indirect means. Even at that, the early county records of deaths didn’t provide the wide range of data that appeared in later documents.

Marriage records, too, wouldn’t provide much information during that time period. And, of course, before 1850, census records revealed only the head count by age brackets, not the names of each household member.

Most of Nicholas and Elizabeth’s children were born during their previous residence in Pennsylvania. Those records were among those of the historic Conewago Chapel in Adams County, Pennsylvania, one of the earlier outposts of what eventually became a Jesuit mission circuit. Thankfully, some of those baptismal records can still be obtained via transcribed database at FamilySearch.org.

The Nicholas Schneider family likely continued westward on a trail by then long used by Catholics. Tending to gather with people of like-minded faith, especially in the context of a fledgling country still carrying over old-world hostilities between Protestants and Catholics, German Catholics like Nicholas may well have been drawn to the new frontier location in Ohio simply because of the early Catholic church already established in Somerset.

When Nicholas and Elizabeth arrived in Perry County, and completed the transaction that granted them farm land in Hopewell Township, they brought with them seven children—six of whom were born in the United States. The eldest, Jacob, was born in Germany, along with two others who died during emigration. Catherine, Joseph, Lewis, and Maria Augusta (later referred to simply as Mary) were most likely born in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and were baptized at the Conewago Chapel. Simon and Peter were born after the decision was made to leave Adams County, but before the family arrived in Perry County, Ohio. Family tradition has it that these two sons were born in Maryland. Adding to all those, Conrad, the final son, as we’ve seen from the old Saint Joseph Church baptismal record transcriptions, was baptized near Somerset, Ohio—and was listed there as a twin.

Now that we have the list of players, we’ll take some time tomorrow to explore what became of them as they came of age in their new home in the frontier state of Ohio.

Above left: Adolf Lins, "Spielende Kinder in der Schwalm," (Children Playing), oil on canvas; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain in the United States, EU, Australia, and countries with a copyright term of life of the artist plus seventy years. 

It Pays to Look Around

While it was disappointing to let go of any notion of becoming part of the First Families of Ohio, I couldn’t quite yet abandon the chase. There are, after all, a couple anecdotal bits of evidence still claiming that our Flowers ancestors were in Ohio before 1820—as early as 1814, in fact. Proving that point through proper documentation, however, is becoming nigh impossible.

Not to call it quits too early, I took heed to that old saw about Perry County. Everyone there is related somehow, remember? Those roots in that county go way back.

So I thought it wouldn’t hurt to take a moment to wander through the scanned pages of the 1820 census for Perry County. After all, it is only a matter of reading through about five pages per township. Totally worth it for a few spare minutes.

I’ve got a whole roster of Perry County surnames floating around in my brain, and when I took a look at the census records, I kept my eye open for those familiar names. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I was stumbling over some Sniders who looked like potential candidates. With a little cross checking in my own database, here’s what I came up with.

On the fifth page of the Perry County census reading for Hopewell Township, I spotted Nicholas Snider. In my database, Nicholas Dominic Schneider was an immigrant from Germany—some say the from the perennially politically-disputed Alsace-Lorraine region—who was born in 1766. Arrival around 1820 in near-wilderness territory in Ohio might have been a stretch for someone getting on in years by that point. Coupled with the obvious change in spelling for his name, it caused me some doubts about the identity of this Snider family in the census.

Once again, as I had done for the John Henry Flowers comparison, I took a look at the family constellation to see if there was a likely match. Without going into the details right now, the records seemed to jive—all the way from the eldest child, Jacob, to the infant, Conrad.

Since this Snider family obviously was in Perry County in time for that 1820 census, I returned to the General Land Office Records website to see if I could find any evidence of property ownership for this Nicholas Schneider (or Snider). What I uncovered there should be worthy of a little jig: a patent image for one “Nicholas + Jacob Snyder of Fairfield County, Ohio” dated March 27, 1820—just in time!

However, my gut still wouldn’t let me be at peace about this. The spelling variants are only a minor irritant, true, but when you consider the larger issue of the county of the land  purchase not being named in the body of the document (it is specified in website records, but not on this particular document), it puts me in the dilemma of wondering whether this might be a Nicholas Snider from another county. After all, there might be someone out there in another part of the state who bears the same name.

Thankfully, that little addition of the second name—the second party of the “tenants in common”—helps further clarify which Nicholas Snider the document identifies. While it doesn’t come out in the property record and state that Jacob is Nicholas’ son, it just so happens that the man’s eldest child was named Jacob.

Just to add a little confirmation to soothe my gut feelings, the early Catholic baptismal records I had sought out the other day once again came to my aid. There, on the records for 1819—just the right interval of time to yield me another young boy in the November 1820 census listing—was the entry for the baby, Conrad. Looking closer at that record, though, I discovered one little detail I had missed before: Conrad had a twin brother! While this will set me on another search for more data, the baptismal entry for May 13, 1819, unmistakably stated: “Conrad & Andrew Snider, twins.”

Someday, when I’m not facing a deadline for lineage society applications, I’ll take up the chase to discover whatever happened to brother Andrew. But for now, I’ve got some documentation to gather together and get in the mail!


Above left: François Barraud, "Paysage de labour," oil on canvas, circa 1929; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain in the United States, EU, and other countries with a copyright term of life of the artist plus 70 years or less.