♂Robert Jacob Schneck

Robert Jacob Schneck (23 March 1901 – 2 February 1978) was a physician from Mount Carmel, Illinois, the third doctor in three generations of his family, who left his home town to practise medicine in Detroit, Michigan, for at least twenty years. He was the only brother of Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968), the mother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

He was born at Mount Carmel, in Wabash County, Illinois, the son of Dr. Sereno Watson Schneck (1875–1953) and Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954). His grandfather, Dr. Jacob Schneck (1843–1906), had settled in Mount Carmel as a physician after the Civil War, and his father practised there for half a century. The censuses of 1910 and 1920 find Robert at home in his parents’ household in Mount Carmel, with his elder sister, Mary Esther; the 1910 census records that his mother had borne two children, both living, so the two were the only children of the marriage.

He followed his father and grandfather into medicine. A biography of his mother printed in the Illinois state history of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1925 already calls him “Dr. R. J. Schneck”, and places him at that time in Boston, Massachusetts.

Detroit

By 1930 he had settled in Detroit. The census taken in April of that year finds him, aged 29 and unmarried, sharing a rented house with another young physician, Dr. George M. Saunders; the enumerator listed Robert as Saunders’s “partner”, both men as physicians, and Robert as working on his own account. The same enumerator spelled his name “Schnick”, a form the Detroit census takers used again in 1940. A Detroit city directory of the 1930s lists his office in the David Whitney Building downtown.

On 19 June 1936 he married Julia J. Barndt in Detroit. The Wayne County marriage licence, issued on 29 May, describes him as a physician of 35, born in Illinois, the son of Sereno Schneck and Mabel Wilkinson, and her as a clerk of 31, born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of Sylvester W. Barndt; neither had been married before. They were married by a pastor, Kirk B. O’Ferrall. Julia died in December 1983 in Wayne County, Michigan.

He was still living and practising in Detroit in 1940, when the census listed him as a medical doctor and head of his own household, and his draft registration of 1942 gives his home as 2129 Iroquois, Detroit, and his office as 641 David Whitney Building, where he was his own employer. The man named on that card as the person who would always know his address was his father, Dr. S. W. Schneck of Mount Carmel. The 1950 census again finds him in Detroit, aged 49, as a physician in his own practice, working fifty hours a week.

Later life

His grandmother Julia Wilkinson’s obituary in 1951 names him as Dr. Robert J. Schneck of Detroit, and his mother’s in May 1954 names him as her son, Robert J. Schneck, of Detroit. A Detroit newspaper notice of 1960 gives his home as Voltaire Place. He died on 2 February 1978 at Royal Oak, Oakland County, Michigan, his residence then being Grosse Pointe Farms, Wayne County, according to the Michigan death index, which gives his birth as 21 March 1901.