| In 1971, Rolland Adams, a cousin of my father's, published ADAMS FAMILY HISTORY 1716-1971 in collaboration with Jeffrey Wright -- coincidentally enough, a cousin of my mother's. Rolland's mother was a Snyder, so half the book is about the Snyders. Several documents, including a "Weinkaufbrief" (wine-sale letter) and the assumption that Elsoff was an alternate spelling of Elsaß led Rolland to believe that the family was indeed from Alsace, the wine-growing, German-speaking part of France. My screen-name is no joke. I have always been interested in maps, and I got a detailed map to locate on it the villages the Schneiders came from. No luck. In 2001 I was visiting my father in Newport, PA and read an article in the Harrisburg Patriot-News by a person who had visited his ancestral village of Elsoff in the former duchy of Siegen-Wittgenstein in the Rothaargebirge (the Red-Haired Mountains)of west-central Germany. His email address was in the article, so I wrote to him. He informed me that another village mentioned in the documents, Biebighausen, was right across the border from Elsoff in the state of Hessen. With a lot of help from the internet I confirmed that the sister the Schneiders left behind, Christine, married a Georg Gelbach in 1813 in Elsoff, just as Rolland's documents said. With that confirmed,I got in touch with Paul Riedesel, who put me in touch with genealogical researcher Herr Mehldau who has copies of the church registries of the Evangelische Kirche in Elsoff (http://www.kircheansnetz.de/elsoff/index.htm). He sent me page after page of Schneiders back to 1600 and their kin (there's a Kuhn listed born in 1475). He even found the Schneiders' address in Elsoff; the house is still "in the family," the Guecker family. Björn Guecker is my 6th cousin once removed. I had also found the website of Michael Pfeil of Much, Germany (a suburb of Köln) (www.pfeilonline.de), whose pages list many of the same names and places in Wittgenstein. The Family Tree Maker relationship calculator tells me that Michael is my tenth cousin twice removed. For pictures of the beautiful village of Elsoff go to http://www.elsoff-wittgenstein.de and click on the word "Bilder" on the left. Just as Rolland's book was called the ADAMS FAMILY HISTORY, this website will also give information on, among others, the Pennsylvania rifle-making Shulers of Liverpool, PA; 1920s Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Clark; the Zeiders family; Jeffrey Wright's and my mutual family (including Teddy Roosevelt and St. Katherine Mary Drexel) the Merediths (including Declaration of Independence signator Benjamin Rush); and, to return the favor, the Adamses. If you find mistakes and omissions, please let me know. Also let me know if we have a mutual ancestor. As I have done above with Michael Pfeil's URL, I would like to include websites listing our related ancestors. FamilyTreeMaker will only let me list 2000 people, so some that I have on the database are not on the website. Ask me and I'll look. Many thanks to: Audrey Risser for some additional information on the descendants of Thomas Clark; Randy Wert (http://www.users.fast.net/~rtwert/)for connections to the Wertz family -- who were really named Wirth; my cousin Dawn Wolfe who is one of those; to Frank L. and Faye Fry for some really detailed Wertz info. Thanks are due from a very historical aspect to Cheryl Meyers, who made the connection between my family and settlers to the Swedish Colony in what is now Philadelphia. See www.colonialswedes.com. Their story is a fascinating one and their struggle certainly presages the American Revolution. |
Schneiders of Wittgenstein & Snyders of Perry Co., PA
Updated May 23, 2008 |
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Wm. Clark Snyder 107 Lincoln Ave. Johnson City, NY 13790 United States 607/729-8600 Mapman923@aol.com |
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