Discovering Nicholas Ackley was just the beginning of my journey through the Ackley family history in my ancestry. I had intended to spend less time on the others in the distant past, but curiosity has a way of taking over.
James Ackley’s signature and seal on his will
As it became obvious that it will take several months to complete the next book, I decided to release each draft chapter as it is completed, at least through the 1700s. This allows those who are interested early access and may have the added benefit of encouraging readers to contact me with any information I may not have found.
Generation 2 is Nicholas’s son James and his wife Elizabeth. Discovering James Ackleyis available by clicking here.
Dates of birth and maiden names of female ancestors often are undiscoverable, something that many amateur family historians find difficult to accept. In the modern era, we have become used to women being clearly identified in official records. It is easy to forget that this was far from true in colonial Connecticut.
As an example, in my line of Ackleys, the original families of the women in the first three generations remain unidentified: Hannah and Miriam, the wives of Nicholas-1 (abt 1630-1695); Elizabeth, the wife of James (abt 1677-1746); and Jerusha(?), the first wife of Nicholas-2 (1708-1763).[1]
A typical Puritan wedding: a civil ceremony with a small group in attendance
Sadly, online Ackley family histories routinely misidentify each of these women. This is unnecessary. Although available verifiable facts may not solve the puzzle, they can eliminate some possibilities and avoid perpetuating mistakes. We owe these hardy female ancestors the time it takes to sort through the puzzles pieces and toss those that just do not fit.
In a previous post, I outlined the common mistakes made about Elizabeth Ackley. I will be taking a closer look at Jerusha in a later post, but already know that she cannot be the Jerusha Graves so many online histories cite as the wife of Nicholas-2.
Hannah and Miriam, Wives of Nicholas-1 Ackley
Discovering Nicholas Ackley devotes several pages to exploring who Hannah[2] might have been, and includes a shorter section on Nicholas-1’s second wife, Miriam. What follows is a brief summary; please see Discovering Nicholas Ackley for additional details and a full list of sources, or contact me.
Hannah Ackley
Nicholas likely married Hannah, in 1655, although no record of the marriage itself exists. Marriages in Puritan Hartford were not the church affair most might assume. The Puritans saw marriage as a covenant, a legal contract between the man and the woman. It was a magistrate or other civil official who performed marriages, not a pastor or other church functionary. Puritans insisted couples marry for love because strong families, with faithful spouses, were seen as the bedrock of their way of life. The average age for women to marry in the colonies at that time was 23, based on the idea that younger women might lack the mature judgment required to select a life-long spouse.[3]
Where Hannah originated is unknown and the possibilities are extensive. So many more men than women had migrated to the New World in the 1630s and early 1640s that the ratio of men to women in Hartford was two to one. By 1640, the average age for men to marry was 30 because of the shortage of women.[4] Although it had begun to even out, the shortage still was serious when Nicholas married in the mid-1650s. Hannah, then, might have come from elsewhere in the colony or even recently arrived from England. It not impossible that they had travelled over together, well chaperoned, or even met on the voyage. It is unlikely Hannah travelled alone, however.
The possibilities of Hannah’s origin that are mentioned most often are as follows.
Hannah “Ford”
That maiden name for her does not appear in any of the references based on old town records.[5] A complication is that maiden names invariably were dropped once the woman married. However, it does not seem likely that Hannah was a Ford.
Not Hannah Ford born in Dorchester, County Dorset, England. Although this birthplace and date turn up in numerous online genealogies, this is not our Hannah. Thomas Ford of Windsor, Connecticut did have a daughter named Hannah born in Dorchester, England on 1 Feb 1628/9. But that Hannah died in England on 28 March 1629, just weeks after her birth.[6] (Thomas arrived in CT about 1635.)
Not Hannah Ford of Trumbull Street. A second possibility is that she was the daughter of the Thomas Ford who was admitted in 1649 as an inhabitant of Hartford with the address of Lot 42 on Trumbull Street.[7] This is the same property where Nicholas was living in 1655 when he was admitted as an inhabitant and where he lived with Hannah until his move to Haddam in 1667.
Is that a coincidence, or not?
A “Lot 42 Hannah Ford” is possible only if there were two Thomas Fords. But there were not. The only Thomas Ford who immigrated was the one noted above from Dorchester, England, whose only daughter named Hannah died shortly after her birth. It is a mystery as to why Ford owned the property in Hartford (see appendix 3 in Discovering Nicholas Ackley), but it is certain that he cannot have been the father of our Hannah.
According to Banks,[8] three other Fords did immigrate to the New England colonies between 1630 and 1650: John to Weymouth, Stephen to the Isles of Shoals, and William to Plymouth.[9]
John Ford arrived unmarried in Weymouth in 1635. He would have had to marry almost immediately to produce a Hannah old enough to marry Nicholas in 1655, unlikely although not impossible. A widow would have been too old to have produced Nicholas’s last child about 1677.
Stephen Ford emigrated to the Isles of Shoals but no more information about him is readily available. Given the location, he is unlikely to have been Hannah’s father.
William Ford arrived in Plymouth in 1621; he did marry a woman named Hannah. But she was still his wife when she died in the 1680s and none of his daughters was named Hannah.
With the idea that perhaps the old handwriting had been misread, I also looked at similar last names in the Hartford area, e.g., Lord. No Hannahs.
Hannah “Ford Mitchell”
The online Ackley family genealogies that list Hannah Ford Mitchell as Nicholas’s wife appear to refer to two different Hannahs. One was born in 1614, but died in 1650, about five years before Nicholas married. The other Hannah supposedly was born anywhere between 1629 and 1639, dates for which I have yet to find any source. Any date later than 1636 is probably too late, but not impossible. As noted above, the Puritans strongly discouraged early marriage.
The “Ford Mitchell” part of this name is never clearly explained.[10] Children were not given middle names for about another hundred years and women did not use their maiden names as middle names after marriage (how I wish they had!). Middle names do not appear in the records from early Connecticut.
Some Ackley family histories suggest Hannah was the widow of a Mitchell. For that to be true, her first husband had to have lived but briefly after the marriage. That a first husband died would be more likely than divorce, which was rare and took years. Had there been a first husband who died, however, probate would have been undertaken and the widow listed by name. No such probate record exists, and such records are remarkably complete for Connecticut at this time.
Mitchell appears as a name in several colonial Connecticut towns. John Mitchell, a barber, lived in early Hartford in Nicholas’s time.[11] In fact, Nicholas sold one of his Hartford properties to him in 1668. None of John Mitchell’s daughters, however, was named Hannah and all were still unmarried at his death in 1683. A Mitchell also lived in Wethersfield, not far away, but none of his daughters or wives was named Hannah. Neither Mitchell had a son who could have been a first husband of Hannah. A different Mitchell, from a more distant town, is a slight possibility.
I also attempted to locate a possible Hannah (or Hanna, or Hana, or Anna) by looking through all available probate records for the early settlers, which regularly listed all their children. The sprinkling of Hannahs I found either were too young or married to someone else. Any widows of a similar name also were unavailable.
A final possibility is that Hannah was the daughter of one of the few servants brought to the colonies. If that were the case, looking for her name among the early settlers would be pointless. The names of servants rarely were recorded in official documents.
For now, then, Hannah’s parentage remains unknown. What we do know of her is that she had to have been a strong woman to have met the challenges of the time and produced as many as 12 children, 10 of whom survived to adulthood.
Miriam
Hannah died in about 1687. In about 1688, Nicholas married his second wife, Miriam,[12] who is just as much of a mystery as Hannah.
All we know about Miriam is that she was a widow. We have no idea of Miriam’s age or whether she had children from her earlier marriage. No children from her first marriage are listed in the probate of Nicholas’s estate, but they would not have been entitled to any of the estate and so would not be mentioned. (Nicholas died without a will.) She and Nicholas did not have children, but that does not necessarily reveal her age.
Some Ackley family genealogies list Miriam’s surname as “Moore” at the time she married Nicholas. The source for that is unclear since records from the time note only that she was Nicholas’s second wife and do not list surname.[13] One false lead now discounted is that she was the Miriam Moore who was the daughter of Miles and Isabel Joyner Moore of New London. This Miriam married John Willey in 1670. In 1687, he moved with his family to the part of Haddam that became East Haddam, where some of the Ackley sons were settling. He died in May 1688, the year Nicholas married again. But Miriam Moore Willey married Samuel Spencer in 1689, not Nicholas Ackley.[14]
What happened to Miriam after Nicholas’s death in 1695 is unknown. Some of the children still were living at home and she may have remained with them at the homestead until it was sold three years later.
My search for Miriam was somewhat less thorough than for Hannah since she is not a direct ancestor. I did search various sources and probate records for “Miriam” or variations on that name. I found none with dates or marital status that would fit.
For many of these strong, remarkable female ancestors, then, we have very few facts. It is not impossible that records may yet be found, but every lead needs to be checked and rechecked. Knowing more about the culture of the time can help determine whether a particular fact could be true.
If anyone has any new information on any of these women in the Ackley family history, I would be thrilled to see it. Please contact me using the form on this website.
Copies of Discovering Nicholas Ackley are available on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and from Lulu.com.
[1] The maiden name of his second wife is recorded.
[2] I have not seen any original documents showing that this was her name, but am accepting on faith that some ancient family history recorded that correctly.
[3] See DH Fischer, 1989, Albion’s seed: four British folkways in America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 78-69
[4] JT Main, 1985, Society and economy in colonial Connecticut, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 5
[5] The LDS/Ancestry database, while useful for clues, does not purport to be definitive and is based on family histories and recollection as well as primary sources. In the case of Hannah, it simply perpetuates misinformation.
[6] Dorset Holy Trinity Church, n.d., Dorset parish registers, 1559‐1812, Dorchester, England: Dorset History Centre.
[7] WS Porter, 1842, Historical notices of Connecticut, no.1: Hartford, Hartford: Elihu Geer’s Press, p. 37.
[8] CE Banks, 1963, Topographical dictionary of 2885 English emigrants to New England, 1620‐1650, Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co.
[9] The information about John, Stephen and William Ford is from a search on Ancestry.com, so not exhaustive but enough to discount them as likely sources.
[10] It likely is just coincidence that Thomas Ford once owned Lot 42 on Trumbull Street, which Nicholas later bought, and that Nicholas sold his upland Hartford property to John Mitchell – “Ford” and “Mitchell” or “Ford Mitchell”. But this may well be the source of those last names being associated with Hannah.
[11] JH Trumbull (ed.), 1886, The memorial history of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633–1884, vol. I. Boston: Edward J. Osgood, p. 275
[12] At least it is certain this was her given name since she is identified by name in Nicholas’s estate probate.
[13] It is possible that a source exists and I have not found it. Any mentions of “Moore” that I have seen do not indicate the source of information.
[14] OJ Harvey, 1899, The Harvey book: giving the genealogies of certain branches of the American families of Harvey, Nesbitt, Dixon and Jameson, and notes on many other families, together with numerous biographical sketches, Wilkes-Barre, PA: E.B. Yordy & Co, pp. 595-596.
James Ackley was the youngest of Nicholas Ackley’s children. As with James’s mother Hannah (post to come or see Discovering Nicholas Ackley), the parentage and year of birth of James’s wife Elizabeth remains a mystery.
Various Ackley family histories claim to provide the answer about Elizabeth’s parentage, but none provides any clear proof and most, perhaps unwittingly, present false information. As is explained below, even Elizabeth’s age at death may not be what is recorded on her gravestone.
Elizabeth Ackley’s gravestone, Old Cove Burying Ground, East Haddam, CT
About her parentage: The extensive online Ackley family genealogy has her born in 1689 in East Haddam to Nathaniel Comedy and his wife Mary Bachelder.[1] This includes numerous errors. Mary Bachelder was married to Nathaniel Cowdrey and they did not have a daughter named Elizabeth. It was their son Nathaniel Cowdrey, Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Parker who had a daughter named Elizabeth Cowdrey, born in Reading, MA on 6 Oct 1689[2]. This Elizabeth married Timothy Goodwin in Reading, MA in 1708.[3] So this cannot be our Elizabeth, who gave birth to James’s first child in 1707. These errors, however, appear again and again in online Ackley family genealogies.
Other considerations would suggest this is not our Elizabeth. NoNathaniel Cowdrey family lived in East Haddam at the time. The Nathaniel Cowdrey, Jr. above could not have moved to East Haddam because he died shortly after his daughter’s birth. According to his probate papers,[4] Nathaniel Cowdrey, Jr. died in 1690 in the “Expedition to Canada” in King William’s War and was a resident of Reading at that time. His widow married Jeremiah Swayne/Swain of Reading shortly thereafter; they both died in 1696.[5] IN 1697, Hannaniah Parker was granted guardianship for his “Grand Daughter Elizabeth Cowdrey Daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth [Parker] Cowdrey late of Redding in sd County of Middx Deced Intestate. She being a minor of about 8 years of age.”[6] That Elizabeth, then, most likely continued to live with her great grandfather after her parents’ deaths until her marriage to Goodwin and never lived in East Haddam, CT.
Our Elizabeth Ackley is not this Elizabeth Cowdrey, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Elizabeth had become a common name. Could she have been another Elizabeth Cowdrey? The answer is “no.” I suspect the original choice of Cowdrey was because someone discovered a birth year for an Elizabeth that coincided with the age listed on Elizabeth Ackley’s gravestone. No Cowdrey family, however, appears in East Haddam vital records before 1733 when a daughter, Huldah, was born to Nathaniel and Mehittabell. This couple would have been the age of James and Elizabeth’s children; they could not have been the parents of James’s wife Elizabeth.[7],[8]
Probate records for early Connecticut capture about 80-85% of actual deaths, according to Main, but much closer to all of those for men with families.[9] A search through the three volumes of Manwaring’s probate abstracts showed no probates for any Cowdreys at all during the period 1635–1750 and included no names that might easily be mistaken for Cowdrey.[10],[11] It is extremely unlikely that a Cowdrey family settled in Connecticut would not have had at least one probate recorded for a family member during that time. It is almost impossible for Elizabeth to have been the daughter of Connecticut Cowdreys.
So was she a Comedy? I suspect that was a misreading of some spidery scribble of Cowdrey. A look through the vital records reveals absolutely no Comedys living in or near New England at that time—using any spelling imaginable (e.g. Comety, Camady, Comede, etc.). The probate records also do not contain a Comedy, by any spelling.
Elizabeth Ackley’s parentage, then, remains a mystery.
About her year of birth: To be in the 66th year of her life at her death on 19 September 1755, Elizabeth would have had to be born after 19 September 1689. This fits with the 6 October 1689 date often cited in Ackley family histories, but we have established above that this birth date belongs to a different Elizabeth. Note also that gravestones can be wrong, and too often are. It is possible Elizabeth Ackley was not the age claimed on the stone, but a few years older.
The first child of James and Elizabeth (James Jr.) was born in July 1707. At the latest, then, the couple married in 1706. If Elizabeth was born in 1689, she would have been 16 or 17 at the time (depending on the actual month/day of her birth and marriage). Although women were marrying earlier than in Nicholas’s day, this is very young and 22 was the average age for women to marry.[12]
The cadence of the birth of Elizabeth’s children also seems unusual. She would have been 32 at the birth of her sixth child and 39 with the seventh and last (see table). An apparent seven-year gap during peak childbearing years would be unusual as would having a final child at a relatively young 39.[13]
I suspect Elizabeth may have been as much as five years older than the gravestone claims. Why the discrepancy? It is possible she claimed to be younger than she was, or perhaps the person ordering the stone was uncertain about her actual age. Again, it is not unusual for gravestones to be incorrect.
Elizabeth’s birth year matters because an incorrect year would make finding her maiden name even more challenging by, say, looking for all Elizabeths born in the area in a particular year. This may well be the genesis of the Elizabeth Cowdrey mistake.
Even knowing her birth year might not solve the question of her parentage. Old records very often are incomplete: the record of her birth may have been recorded in a ledger not yet discovered or lost entirely. The record of her marriage to James also has not been found.
We do not know, then, who Elizabeth’s parents were; and we cannot be certain about her year of birth or marriage. Although this may frustrate some, it is just the nature of genealogy. Not knowing these facts does not change who she was. But giving her a maiden name and parentage that is not hers does her an injustice, particularly when verifiable facts are readily available to rule out obvious errors.
[5] Ancestry, 2018: Reading Deaths, p. 596. As noted in Discovering Nicholas Ackley, this was one of the worse years of the Little Ice Age and starvation or illness because of poor diet and extreme weather caused many deaths.
[8] A Cowdrey does marry an Ackley: Loren Cowdrey marries Sarah Ackley in East Hampton, CT two hundred years later, in 1819. Ancestry.com, 2013: East Hampton church records.
[13] Of course, later pregnancies could have been unsuccessful.
References
Ancestry.com (2011). Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988: Reading Births.
Ancestry.com (2018). Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Birth, Marriage, and Death Records, 1700-1850: Reading Deaths.
Main, JTM. (1985) Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Manwaring, CW. (1904a). A digest of the early Connecticut probate records: Hartford district, 1687-1695. Hartford, CT, R.S. Peck & Co. Printers.
Manwaring, CW. (1904b). A digest of the early Connecticut probate records: Hartford District, 1700-1729. Harford, CT, R.S. Peck & Co.
Manwaring, CW. (1904c). A digest of the early Connecticut probate records: Hartford District, 1729-1750. Harford, CT, R.S. Peck & Co.
Mehling, MBA. (1911). Cowdrey-Cowdery-Cowdary genealogy: William Cowdery of Lynn, Massachusetts, 1603 and his descendants. New York, NY, Frank Allaben Genealogical Company.
White, LC, Ed. (1997). The Barbour Collection of Connecticut town vital records: East Haddam, 1743-1857. Baltimore, MD, Genealogical Publishing Co.
Discovering Nicholas Ackley 