♀Elizabeth Burkhart

Elizabeth Burkhart (18 January 1823 – 14 November 1876) was a native of Alsace who spent most of her adult life in Posey County, Indiana, where, widowed in her mid-thirties with six children, she was enumerated in 1870 as a farmer in her own right. She was the great-great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jacob Schneck (1843–1906), his son Sereno Watson Schneck (1875–1953) and Sereno’s daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

She was born in Alsace, then part of France: the civil birth register of Nehwiller-près-Woerth, in Bas-Rhin, records her birth there on 18 January 1823. Her gravestone gives the date as 18 January 1821. A county history’s sketch of her son Jacob says she was a native of Alsace, then a province of France, and was only seven years old when her parents emigrated to America. The 1850 census gave her birthplace as Germany; the 1870 census gave France, and so did the 1880 and 1900 census entries of her son Jacob and the 1934 death certificate of her son Henry. A family chart compiled in 1994 names her parents as Jacob Burkhardt and Margaretta Peipher, says that both died about 1831 at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and places her birth at “Haugenau”, probably Haguenau in northern Alsace. The register names Nehwiller instead, and the parents it gives, Jean Jacques Burckhardt and Anne Marguerite Pfeiffer, are the chart’s couple; no record confirms the chart’s account of their deaths at Lancaster.

Marriage and family

On 26 January 1843, at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she married John F. Schneck (1812–1857), a German-born carpenter; the county history calls her “Miss Elizabeth Burkhart, of Lancaster, Pa.” The same history says that the couple moved west that year to New Harmony, in Posey County, Indiana, drawn there by relatives of hers. In the census of August 1850 they were in Harmony Township, Posey County: Frederick, as her husband was enumerated, a carpenter aged 37 with $600 in real estate, Elizabeth aged 27, and three children. The couple had six children, born between 1843 and 1855: Jacob, Barbara Catherine, Mary Louise, who went by Louisa, Charles, John and Henry.

Her husband died in 1857. Elizabeth stayed in Posey County, and in June 1870 the census found her in Robb Township, listed as a widow aged 47 and a farmer, not as keeping house, with $4,500 in real estate and $1,300 in personal property. Charles, John and Henry, aged 19, 17 and 14, helped on the farm, and Louisa, 21, worked in the house. Jacob, the eldest, had by then moved to Mount Carmel, Illinois, and become a physician.

Death

A Find a Grave memorial gives her death as 14 November 1876 in Posey County, and her burial in the same county.

Notes

The civil birth register of Nehwiller-près-Woerth (1823, act no. 4) gives 18 January 1823, the same day and month as the gravestone, which reads 1821. Her ages in the censuses of 1850 and 1870, 27 and 47, point to about 1822 or 1823, and the county history and the 1994 family chart both give 1823. Her death date is also in doubt: the family chart gives 26 November 1877 at New Harmony, and the county history says she survived her husband many years and died at New Harmony in September 1879.