Carter/Ploughe/Snyder and Mitchell/Kenyon/VanHorn Family Trees

10 Nov 2015: Research into the ship he arrived on, have narrowed it to the Goeschen, which arrived in New York on 25 Jun 1864. This seems logical because his age is right, and the ship did depart from Havre, France. The ship's registry indicates that his place of birth was Baden, Germany, which is just across the river from Strausburg, France. This corresponds to family recollection which is that he came from "Alsace-Lorraine". Strausbourg has been both German and French; in 1864 it was part of France.

Check passenger list for Goeschen's arrival on June 25, 1864.

Review and check out The Alsace Emigration Book to see if he's mentioned.

Email to Ted Fienning regarding John Schneider dated 12/21/2015

I have to agree with your researcher on the frustrations of finding some obscure items. As you can probably tell if you've logged into Ancestry recently, I've found out a whole lot ... but I question the accuracy of some of it.

There are a couple of flaws with doing the kind of online research that I'm doing now. First of all, it's easy to copy from someone else's
family tree, but unless you can look at the original documents, it's easy to make a mistake. As an example, when I was doing this several
years ago, I uploaded some data to the Mormon's website which included as a source a private letter I'd received from your grandmother. I didn't copy it, just referenced "private letter from Ruth Gibson Snyder." Private letters are usually not very good sources, but they do give you a flavor for family relationships. You'd be amazed how many of the online family trees now include that reference; they have no idea what's in it, so it tells me that whatever mistakes I made years ago have now percolated throughout many other family trees.

The second flaw is that even when the documents are online, many are indexed poorly or not at all. Reading the spidery handwriting of old reports can be very difficult, and the minimum-wage people who do it for Ancestry.com and the other commercial websites are more interested in speed than precision. If your family tree is one that interests the Mormons, then you're in luck because their volunteers do a very good job of indexing these old records. The contrast is startling. Your great grandmother Alura Snyder's family illustrates this; the Beebes are of interest to them, so theres lots of references to original documents, but the Baldwins and the Snyders were not, so there's very little.

And your researcher is right; without looking at the original documents - whether on microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or in a tiny churchyard in Germany, you can't be sure you've actually found your relatives. And it is terribly time consuming, which is why it's a great hobby for people like me who are retired and don't like to watch football or the fishing channel. I spent hours last night trying to discover more about my great (your great-great) grandfather John Casper Schneider.

And ran into a brick wall. I've become fascinated by several of our lesser known relatives, and he is one of them. There's almost nothing
about him anywhere in anyone's recorded memory, probably because he died n 1890, and was overshadowed by his indomitable wife. I know he was recruited from Strausburg, which then was a part of France, to enlist in the Civil War, and I've found that he joined his New York regiment in September, 1864. Several ships arrived earlier that year, and two are the most likely prospects since they both had passengers whose name was similar to his: the Electric and the Goeschen, which arrived in New York on June 25, 1864. Neither passenger list is available online (just an index), so that's been a dead end. In Salt Lake City I'll also be able to review microfilm copies of the embarkation lists of these and other ships, and that might lead me to discover exactly where he came from.

It's interesting that at 27 he was by far the oldest private in his company, most of whom were teenagers, according to a memoir of the 80th New York which I found scanned and online for free on Google Books. The book itself is a wonderful story of a gentle man who wrote it for his grandchildren. "Reminiscences of a Boy in the Civil War" was written by Enos Ballard Vail, and a picture of Mr. Vail on the book cover and the book itself in ePub format is attached. Vail joined the New York 80th as a boy of 15 or so, participated in several pivotal battles, and was badly injured and discharged from the Army a few months before Schneider joined. It isn't long, and makes for wonderful reading even if there's no family connection. But there is.

Every single order issued by every single unit in the Civil War, and nearly every change in the chain of command was assembled in a massive series of books printed in 1904-1910 and is available in many libraries (including ours here in Grand Junction). So it's possible to read the orders issued to the New York 80th as they assembled for the Battle of Petersburg, the last battle of the Civil War. Vail's book contains some pretty candid references to his officers and comrades, and many of them were still there when Schneider joined up, and at least one or two must have been his CO's and NCO's. I wonder what Vail, who was a grizzled veteran at 19 years old, would have thought of Schneider, a 27 year old farmer who couldn't speak much English.

I've had great fun finding this stuff, and I really appreciate being able to share it with someone who is interested.