I’ve decided to start researching a different line than the ones I’ve been researching in my genealogical researches. My Swiss Schuler ancestry has been very easy to research. The efforts of my distant Swiss cousin, Ansgar Schuler, have been of enormous help. Basically I can trace the Schuler ancestry back to the 14th century. Ansgar claims he can go back to the 8th century but I suspect he may be overreaching a little bit here. I’ll post the details later.
My mother’s Blanchard ancestors have been quite difficult to research. They’re a pretty shifty bunch cleverly avoiding being listed in the federal census. I’ve been trying to go back farther than about 1820 without any real luck for about six years now.
So I’ve decided to start researching my Schneider ancestors–my maternal grandmother’s family. I started by going to Ancestry.com.
If you haven’t been to Ancestry.com it’s a great resource with Social Security records, federal census records, death records, marriage records, and an enormous variety of other sources, indexed with varying degrees of completeness, and searchable online.
I started with my maternal grandmother’s father’s name. Didn’t have much luck. I wasn’t too surprised by this–he was also kind of a shifty character. Then I kicked in my maternal grandmother’s mother’s name. That gave me the 1920 federal census record entry which I’d located previously. Only one other of my maternal grandmother’s siblings lived to have children of his own–my mother’s Uncle Ed. Ed died just this last year. He was over 90.
Well, without going into too burdensome a detail, I’ve got a good lead. I believe that I’ve discovered the federal census entry and marriage record for my maternal grandfather’s parents: William and Celestine Didier Schneider. This sounds pretty good since both William and Celestine were names of my maternal grandmother’s siblings. This is further interesting since Ed always claimed that “Dee-jee” was one of the names in his family and that’s not that far from Didier. This could be pretty interesting since Didier is an early St. Louis settler name.
Well, I’ll keep digging.
