This post debunks the mistaken Hackley heritage that often appears in Ackley family histories and demonstrates how knowledge of the times and use of verified facts can separate fact from fiction. It is based on an appendix in Discovering Nicholas Ackley.

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Note: After I researched and wrote this appendix, it became clear that the Hackley genealogy[1] was prepared by an infamous master forger of genealogies, Gustav Anjou, who also designed the fake Hackley crest. The forgery has all his earmarks. For a summary discussion about Anjou and a list of the dozens of fake genealogies he produced, see Wingate.[2]

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The attribution of Nicholas’s birth to the village of Hopton Castle, Shropshire, appears to be based primarily on a book published in 1948 to honor Charles Henry Hackley, a wealthy Muskegon, Michigan businessman. It was prepared by his long-time friend and admirer Louis P. Haight and was printed by a local commercial printer nearly half a century later. To add to his friend’s accolades, Haight included a genealogy that was part fact and part fiction. The early sections of it are based on research on English peerage; some of that probably is accurate, but some serious gaps and leaps of faith are troubling.[3]

After that early period, the oddities begin to multiply. The names of towns are confused with what probably are the names of parishes, and those are misspelled; marriages and interactions take place between people distant geographically, which would have been unlikely among all but the upper nobility in England at the time; references are cryptic, at best.

Nicholas appears in several places in the Hackley book, as follows.

FIRST: On page 113: “13. Nicholas, bt. Febr. 21, 1642, in St Ansel, emigrated to Hartford, Conn., living afterwards in East Haddam where he died, Apr. 29, 1695. His name was written Ackley. J.J. Howard Coll. Hartford Ptob. Rec., v,213 iv,4,viii,94,Hist. Sharon, Conn. Hist. Mdx Co. 198.”

We know for certain that Nicholas signed the Nonotuck petition in Hartford in 1653; he could not have been born in 1642.[4]

The references cited in this entry make little sense; the history of Sharon, Connecticut that is cited makes no mention of Nicholas. Some of Nicholas’s grandchildren and their children did settle in Sharon in the 1730s, as is noted in that history (Sarah’s children Alexander Spencer and Mary [Jonathan] Dunham).

The “Hartford Ptob. Rec.” is Nicholas’s probated will, which lists only his date of death, correct here, and does not give his age at death or his birth date. The probate, however, does note that Nicholas lived and died in Haddam—not East Haddam. A Nicholas Ackley did live and die in East Haddam, but he was Nicholas’s grandson by his son James. (Nicholas-2’s son Abel lived for a time in Sharon in the 1760s.)

The “St. Ansel” in this listing would most likely be a church parish, but the name would be spelled St. Anselm. As far as I could determine, a St. Anselm parish did not exist near Hopton Castle although it is not impossible. St. Anselm parishes were sprinkled throughout England. No St. Anslem town existed, as far as I could determine, and English towns rarely disappear over time.

Nicholas’s purported father, John Hackley, is said to have been “churchwarden 1604–1658” of “Hampton Castle,” which ones assumes means Hopton Castle. (p. 113).[5] He is unlikely to have baptized his last child in a different parish and recorded that baptism there.

This entry then, is a mishmash of information, with the only correct facts being that Nicholas Ackley emigrated to Hartford and died on the date given

SECOND: The paragraph above is part of a longer purported lineage that seeks to show that Nicholas’s parents were John Hackley/Hagley and Eleanor Wyman and that he had nearly a dozen siblings. This section is an absolute mess and frankly not worth the time and effort to address line by line. Could Nicholas’s parents have been John and Eleanor? I would say no. Any reference to support that is not given and, for reasons explained in Discovering Nicholas Ackley, Nicholas’s parents were most likely not from Shropshire.

THIRD: In the second entry on page 113, a Nicholas Ackley of St. Anselm is said to have given four acres of land to his brother in “Hampton Castle” in 1661. Who this Nicholas Ackley was is a mystery, but it was not our Nicholas and “Hampton Castle” is fictitious.

On the next page, Nicholas, supposedly the same one, is listed as the son of John Hackley and Elizabeth Bailey, born on “June 11, 1655.” That is obviously impossible for our Nicholas, who bought property, married and paid taxes as a householder in Hartford in 1655. And Nicholas cannot have had two sets of biological parents.

FOURTH: On page 115, it is noted that because Peter Hackley had emigrated, Nicholas Hackley was assigned as administrator of a will in 1684 because Nicholas was “then in England.” Again, this cannot be our Nicholas Ackley who was firmly planted in Connecticut.

This final mention also lists purported relatives of Peter Hackley “the Odgens [sic], Richardsons, Budd, Beach, Huntington, Bailyes [sic], etc., [who] had emigrated to the New World, some settling in Connecticut, and his own uncle, Nicholas Hackley (or as written, phonetically probably) Ackley, had settled at Hartford, Conn., and later on at East Haddam.” It is true that some of these family names are among those of the early settlers in the colonies. A man named John Bailey, in fact, was one of the founders of Haddam, with Nicholas. But Nicholas Ackley was not Peter’s uncle and, again, he did not live in East Haddam.

None of the entries in this publication, then, demonstrate Nicholas’s parentage or place of origin, and I very much doubt they ever were meant to do so. The entire purpose of the Haight publication was to honor Charles Henry Hackley as someone supposedly with noble roots in England and with ancestors involved in the early settlement of this country. Nicholas appears, I suspect, only because some information about him surfaced in the seminal publications about the early settlers that Haight would have used in his search for Hackleys. Nicholas Ackley’s parents, then, remain unidentified.

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[1] L.P. Haight, 1949, The life of Charles Henry Hackley: drawn from old public and family records, Muskegon, MI: Dana Printing Company.

[2] https://www.genealogy.com/forum/general/topics/gen/37674/ For a list of articles written about Anjou and other such genealogical scam artists, see https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Fraudulent_Genealogies#Gustav_Anjou_.281863-1942.29.

[3] Mike Ackley has done a detailed job of ferreting out the inconsistencies in his thorough blog post here:  https://ackleyfamilygenealogy.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-supposed-ancestors-of-nicholas.html

[4] It is not possible that he was born a few years before his baptism. Lag times between actual births and baptisms in England were short, no more than a week or two weeks. This was partly because of the alarmingly high rate of infant mortality and partly because of the English Crown’s desire to keep close count of its population for purposes of taxation. Note that civil records of births, marriages and deaths were not kept in England until the late 1830s; the Church of England was charged with keeping those records beginning in 1538. An individual’s official birthday, then, was his or her date of baptism.

[5] Hampton Court Palace, sometimes called Hampton Court Castle, was a day’s journey away, but the term referred only to the actual castle, not a surrounding town. There was no “Hampton Castle.” Given the political history of England, moreover, a churchwarden at Hampton Court Palace would not have been likely to continue to serve there after the beheading of King Charles I in 1649.