The chapter on Frank is lengthy because it contains not just the history of Frank Ackley and his wife Mary, but also the family histories of Mary’s parents Charles Wessels and Sarah Donovan. As far as I can determine, this is the first time Charles’s ancestry has been explored; and for years Ackley histories have been including the wrong Sarah Donovan.

The Wessels history here begins in the 1790s, long after their arrival in the mid-1600s from Holland when the Dutch founded New Netherlands. The Donovan history begins in Ireland in the early 1800s, then tracks the family across the Atlantic to Canada, and then to the US in the mid-1860s.

This chapter includes vital statistics (births, marriages, deaths) for each family, summaries of their appearance in census, and lists and/or short biographies of their children. This chapter also benefits from the increasing availability of photography—faces can be put to names at least for Frank, Mary, their children and Charles Wessels. I thank my grandmother and mother for saving so many family photos and recording who was in them. (See Frank family photos on Miscellaneous Resources page.)

A summary of the story follows.

Frank Ackley was born in 1854 in what then was Sand Bank, NY, the third child and first son of Arthur William and Sophia Matteson Ackley. His mother died at his birth; his father’s sister lived with the family and raised the children. At 28, Frank married 16-year-old Jessie Thorp, who died from an illness just four years later. Five years after that, Frank, 37, married Mary Priscilla Wessels, 20, who was the daughter of Charles A. Wessels and Sarah Louise Donovan. The Ackleys had five children, four boys and one girl, the youngest boy dying in infancy. Frank was a farmer and lived his entire life on the Ackley homestead. He died there in 1934, age 79; Mary also died there, in 1951 at 80.

Mary’s father, Charles A. Wessels, was born in Ellisburg, NY to John and Martha Wing Wessels. The first Wessels arrived in American from Holland sometime in the mid-1600s, settling near Albany, NY. Luke Wessels, Charles’s grandfather, was born in Schenectady County, served in the War of 1812 in Sackets Harbor, and then settled in Orwell, NY, not far from where Frank’s grandfather Lot West Ackley had just settled in Sand Bank, NY. (See 1839 map on Maps page.)

After the death of both their spouses, Luke Wessels married his son John’s mother-in-law Sally Wing who had brought up her own family in the town of Mexico, NY. At about the same time, Luke appears to have given up farming and may have become a semi-itinerant fisherman along the shores of Lake Ontario. This was a lucrative occupation at the time. The family moved back and forth between the fishing towns of Ellisburg and Texas, NY. Luke and Sally’s last years were spent in Port Ontario, a major fishing town on the lake between Texas and Ellisburg.

Charles’s father John and at least two of Charles’s three siblings died in the late 1850s. By the time Charles’s grandparents had settled in Port Ontario, his mother had remarried. She and Charles, then 16, were living in 1865 with her new husband, also in Port Ontario. This likely is where Charles met Sarah Donovan.

Dennis Donovan and his wife Priscilla Powell left Ireland with their children in about 1847, the first truly desperate year of the potato famine. The large family settled in the wilderness just north of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Priscilla died in the 1850s and Dennis remarried, dying himself probably just after 1861. In 1865, his children began their own migration—four of them to Oswego County, NY. Two brothers settled just up the road from Frank Ackley; one brother settled in Port Ontario. When Sarah arrived is not clear, but she may have worked as a live-in domestic near the brother in Port Ontario, meeting Charles there. They married about 1870 when Charles was about 21 and Sarah was about 24.

Charles and Sarah spent their married lives 10–15 miles inland from Port Ontario in New Centreville where two of Sarah’s brothers lived. (See 1867 Frank Ackley generation map on Maps page.) This was no more than two miles from where Frank Ackley lived on his father’s farm. Charles found work on the railroad and the couple welcomed two daughters, the first being Mary Priscilla Wessels. In 1893, two years after Mary and Frank had married, Sarah Wessels died. Charles then moved about 30 miles to West Monroe, NY, where he married Sarah Rexford Phillips, 20 years his senior. After the second Sarah died, Charles moved to Onondaga County where he lived with his uncle Fuller Wing—the youngest child of Luke’s second wife, Sally, and the youngest sibling of Charles’s mother, Martha. Fuller and Charles were born a year or so apart and were close friends. Charles died at the home of his daughter Mary Ackley in 1924.

 N.A. Mattison, ©2023