It was not until 1850 that censuses began to record the first names of all members of a household. The US censuses before that, taken every decade beginning in 1790, recorded only the name of the head of the household and the numbers of males and females in various age bands. Before that, the only information was scattered from one colony to another, from one town to another, and might be found in various official administrative documents or in church records.
Women are particularly difficult to research because their maiden names disappear at marriage. They rarely could own property and were seldom in charge of their own fates.
One of my ancestors, Sarah, the second wife of a direct ancestor, the second Nicholas Ackley, has been a mystery. Recently, someone reached me with an inquiry about an Ackley ancestor that led back to her and piqued my interest in once again finding more about her.
All I knew about Sarah was that she had married Nicholas-2 Ackley about 1757 and bore their first child, Lewis, in 1758 and second (and last) in 1762. I knew much more about Nicholas-2 who was born in 1708 in East Haddam, CT and died in Colchester, the next town over, in 1763. Nicholas already had raised a family with his first wife, who died about 1756, and would have been 48 when he married Sarah.
I have explained the process that I used to search for Sarah here, including such results as I have. Although this was targeted toward research in the 1700s, the principles apply to research during any time period. Setting specific parameters in this way can narrow down the search, making it less frustrating and more productive.
For this search, I used the following criteria for Sarah Wilson Ackley.
Year of birth between 1717 and 1736, based on possible age at marriage (21 at youngest) and oldest likely age at birth of last known child (45)
Year of death between 1763 and 1806, based on last known record (a guardianship granted in 1763) and maximum age of 70, generous but not impossible at the time
Possible maiden names: Lewis or Wilson. The record of the marriage to Nicholas shows her as Wilson; her first son is named Lewis and it was popular at that time to use the mother’s maiden name as a son’s first name
Possible widowed name: Wilson. It would have been unusual for a woman in her early 20s to have married a man of Nicholas’s age for her first marriage; marrying later as a widow would have been more likely.
Catchment radius: within 25–30 miles of East Haddam/Colchester where Nicholas lived. Travel was difficult—meeting a potential spouse was most likely close to home. (The radius was expanded if nothing appeared within it.)
Because Sarah was such a popular name at the time, searching for a Sarah without specifying a last name produces dozens and dozens of possibilities. The numbers are fewer in the catchment area, using the date parameters, but even sorting through all those Sarahs could be overwhelming.
Note that all the research was done online. More information may be out there on the ground somewhere.
Did I find Sarah? Yes and no. I eliminated many records of women who could not be her. The results showed that her maiden name was probably not Lewis or Wilson. I found one man who died in the early 1750s who could very well have been her first husband—Samuel Wilson Jr., who lived and died within the radius. If Sarah was about the same age as him, she would have been 30 when Lewis was born—about the age I would have expected. Although the results are not certain, it does help focus further searches and eliminates a number of Sarahs with whom our Sarah has been confused.
Tracing my mother’s paternal Ackley genealogy began years ago and has now reached its conclusion.
The information gathered has been made available on this website as draft chapters,* with the idea that these would be combined into a series of books (see graphic). All three books now are available in print from Lulu.com or from Amazon and other online booksellers; two also are available as eBooks. The diagram below shows how the generations are grouped.
The Discovering Nicholas Ackley book is available only in print, as of now, from Lulu.com and other online booksellers.
The Discovering James Ackley, Nicholas Ackley, and Abel Ackleybook is available both in print andas an eBook. The print book is available from Lulu.com and online booksellers. The eBook is available from Lulu.com. The purpose of the eBook is to make the information available at a far lower price than is possible with print versions. It contains the same information as the print book.
TheDiscovering Lot Ackley and Descendants book is available in three versions. A print version on higher quality paper allows the photographs included to be reproduced with much more detail. For those who wish to have a print book at a lower price, the same book is available printed on standard quality paper. It is not nearly as pretty, but it contains the same information. Both books are available on Lulu.com and from online booksellers. An eBook is available from Lulu.com, again to make the same information available at a lower price than print versions allow.
Links for purchasing are posted on the Books Available page on this website or easily can be found through an online search. Links to pdfs that contain the table of contents for each book also are posted on the Books Available page to provide a glimpse of what each contains.
Even though the project is “done,” my interest in it is not. Anyone with questions, or information I may have missed, please contact me using the form on this website.
* The draft chapters were removed from the website primarily because the final versions are written in a way that makes it difficult to re-post them as separate chapters.
Below is a brief overview of the first eight generations of my direct line family of Ackleys in America (and only that line). Note that the table and the summary below do not include references because these are available in the chapters that explore the earlier generations. Please see those for both references and detailed explanations about the research and findings. (This post may be downloaded as a pdf file by clicking here.)
The adventure gene
Nicholas arrived in Hartford, CT in about 1650, less than two decades after its founding. The town was some distance from Boston, which then was the largest city in the northeastern English colonies, and two or three days’ journey from the towns in the south on Long Island Sound. By the time Nicholas married about 1655, life in Hartford was settled—laws were in place, commerce thrived, and the sense of community was strong. But Nicholas left that behind in 1667 to help found what would become Haddam, CT, more than a day’s hard trip away, with about two dozen other families. It was wilderness but offered the prospect of more land and potentially more wealth.
Nicholas’s son and grandson, James and Nicholas-2, did not have the wandering spirit. James moved across the Connecticut River to East Haddam and Nicholas-2 to the adjoining town of Colchester. But Abel, next in line, certainly got the adventure gene. In about 1764, at the age of about 17, he and his younger sister, both recently orphaned, left Colchester for the new town of Sharon, CT. That town was then on the frontier, about 80 miles west. Abel had relatives and friends there, and probably no other good option for himself or his sister. They married siblings and settled across the border in Amenia, Dutchess County, but Abel did not stay. In about 1774, he moved his wife and children about 90 miles north up the Hudson River to what is now White Creek, Washington County, NY.
Two of Abel’s sons led settled lives in Washington County, NY, becoming prosperous farmers, but the youngest son inherited that adventure gene. With his young wife and infant daughter, Lot West Ackley headed west in about 1813, settling 170 miles away in Sand Bank (now Altmar), Oswego County, NY. At the time, it was complete wilderness and he was among the first arrivals. The next three generations stayed in the area.
The migrations were gutsy, for sure, but all were to areas with family or friends. Nicholas likely chose Hartford in part because a group of men also from County Essex, England already was there. Similarly, many of the early settlers of Sharon, CT were from the area of Colchester, CT and Abel had relatives there. Abel also was not alone on the next move: Washington County attracted many from Dutchess County, NY including two Ackley cousins. Forty years later, Lot headed west to Sand Bank at the same time as several other families from Washington County.
Modest lives, comfortable enough
For the most part, the Ackleys were moderately successful farmers, except James, who was in the top two percent of the wealthiest men in CT in the early 1700s. Nicholas-2, his son, probably was not a farmer, but plied a trade such as carpenter or stonemason. He seems to have struggled in life and was the only man in the line to appear to be destitute at his death.
Several Ackley men were involved in local politics and government over the generations; none was particularly prominent. They were the type of family essential to the building of the country—the essential, honest, reliable middle class.
None of the Ackleys appears to have been charged with a crime, although James and his wife were sued for slander by his sister. This family feud is now famous, sadly, as the last time supposed witchcraft was part of a court case in CT (see post here).
Patriotic, but not attracted to war
Some generations in this line participated in wars, some did not. Two of Nicholas’s sons probably fought in the first French and Indian War at the end of the 1600s. Nicholas’s grandson Nicholas-2 and at least two of his sons were in the militia in the last French and Indian War in the mid-1700s. One of those was Abel, who also fought in the Revolutionary War, albeit briefly. His son Lot is rumored to have served in the War of 1812, but likely did not. Two of Lot’s sons (but not my direct line) enlisted at the outset of the Civil War, surviving that horrible conflict but with lifelong injuries. Two Ackley brothers in the eighth generation, including my grandfather, enlisted in World War I—just days before the fighting ended. By the second World War, these men were in their 40s and 50s, and not called up.
Marriage, family and the lives of women
The Ackley men throughout the years married fairly late, some in their mid-to-late 30s. This was not unusual for their times. Men in four of the seven generations of Ackleys married a second time, after the death of a first wife. In most of the generations, the family was created with the first wife and the second was a mid-life marriage. Nicholas-2 did have two sons (not direct line) with a second wife and Frank’s first wife died childless at age 20. Second marriages were common through the generations. Women had few options for supporting themselves; those who were widowed remarried and as soon as possible.
Two Ackley first wives in the earlier generations did outlive their husbands: the wife of wealthy James, who had no need to remarry, and the wife of fifth-generation Lot, whose eldest son supported her. By the 20th century, women remaining unmarried widows was more common: the second wife of Frank outlived her husband as did Arthur-2’s wife and neither remarried.
Until the mid-1800s, most women appeared in records after they married only with their given names, making them virtually impossible to research. Records for both women and men are sparse for the first five generations. The US censuses began in 1790, but it was not until 1850 that the given names of wives and children were recorded. Until then, only the name of the head of household was recorded and the rest were counted by age range and gender.
Good information is available only on one woman in this line before the 1800s: Hannah Shevalier who married Abel in the mid-1700s. A descendant of her father published a well-researched history of that French Huguenot family. After Hannah, the next woman with traceable ancestry is Sophia, who appears by name in the 1850 census. Her family, the Mattesons, arrived in Rhode Island in the mid-1660s (her cousins were my paternal ancestors). Mary, in the seventh generation, was the daughter of Irish immigrants who married into a family whose ancestors had arrived from Holland in the mid-1600s. Her ancestry is explored in the chapter on Frank and Mary. Not being able to trace the other women leaves many questions maddeningly unanswered.
Whatever their ancestry, these were tough and brave women who ran households that required substantial amounts of hard labor just for daily living. Yet they still produced a baby every two to three years for 20–25 years. Until the late 1800s, large families were essential not only to completing the chores of daily life but also to creating and maintaining the overall wealth of the family.
Lengthy but precarious lives
Most of the Ackley men in this line lived long lives for their times. Nicholas died at about 65, which was average for men in his generation in that area of CT; James lived to be about 69; Nicholas‑2 died comparatively young at 54; Abel lived to an amazing 89; Lot to 66; Arthur to 69; Frank to 79 and Arthur-2 to only 55.
Of course, age at death tells us nothing about the quality of life in later years. Medicine for much of this time was rudimentary, and these men would have suffered, perhaps greatly, from ailments and conditions we routinely treat today. This would have been true for the entire family through all generations, and for much of their lives.
Women did die in childbirth, an event often not recorded as such. The only known such death in this direct line was Sophia, my second-great grandmother who died after giving birth to Frank on 31 December 1854. The other wives were past child-bearing age at their deaths, except perhaps Nicholas-2’s first wife, who remains unidentified.
Almost every Ackley generation lost at least one child in childhood. Knowing exactly how many in each generation is impossible before the late 1800s because records for births and deaths were simply not well kept. Children who had died before their fathers died usually did not appear in the father’s probates or wills, of course; official records contained births and deaths only if the parents reported them, which they often just did not do; and many records have been lost over the years. Relying on family lore for such information may mean that children who died young often are simply forgotten by later generations.
The two earliest Ackley generations lost fewer children and experienced fewer deaths from disease than later generations. This was primarily because those early generations were more isolated. As the population, travel, commerce, wars and immigration increased, so did the spread of disease. It is too easy for us in the 21st century to forget that it was after World War II—in the eighth generation and into the ninth—when antibiotics became widely available, effective treatments for heart disease were developed, vaccines for killer childhood diseases appeared, and death from complications of childbirth became uncommon. The complex medical care we take for granted today would have seemed like the wildest of fiction to the first eight Ackley generations in America.
The story of this Ackley line, then, is part of the story of the settlement and development of America and the USA. The chapters on each generation tell that story in greater detail, placing these ancestors in the context of their times. Although we never will know exactly what their lives were like, this approach makes the people in each generation more than just names and dates. That has been a major purpose of the chapters that trace the eight generations.
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.
Censuses are a blessing and a curse for family historians. People become much easier to track and family members easier to identity beginning in 1850. That US census was the first to record the names and ages of everyone in a household. The earlier US censuses recorded the name only of the head of household; the rest were counted by age range and gender. In 1855, New York state (NYS) began its own censuses, also recording names and, that year, recording place of birth—county, if not the current county of residence, or state if outside NYS.
This should mean fewer mysteries, right? We now have place of residence, names, age and, depending on the census, other information such as place of birth and even place of parents’ birth. All this, we imagine, has been based on questions asked of a live person and then carefully written down on the spot.
If only.
Censuses are puzzle pieces, but they are only that. They were not intended to be completely accurate. The purpose was to enumerate the population as a basis for determining policies that provided services such as funding for schools or building infrastructure. A few errors just did not matter.
Census takers were sometimes, well, just awful. Some clearly found spelling a challenge; others (probably most) seem to have filled in data well after the interview, relying on illegible notes or faulty memory. Below are a few examples of what that can mean for the family historian.
In 1855 NYS census, John Wessels lived in Mexico, Oswego County, NY and had four children. One was named Arthur but with a Dutch twist: Arthlo. In the 1850 census, the enumerator has written “Orthello,” adding a Shakespearean flavor to the name. The name never appears again because as a teen Arthlo understandably shoved that name to the middle and used just the initial. He became “Charles A. Wessels.” Figuring out this was the same man required eliminating other possibilities—fairly easy in this case.
Also in the 1855 NYS census, John is listed as being born in Herkimer County, a place I doubt he ever even visited. His parents lived in Orwell, Oswego County, in the 1820, 1830 and 1840 censuses. John was born about 1826. He had to have been born in Orwell; Herkimer was at minimum a two days’ journey. Information for some of John’s siblings confirm that they all were born in Orwell.[1]
So why Herkimer? The census taker may have asked John about his unusual name, Wessels, and where the family came from. In the discussion John may have mentioned that some Wessels had settled in Herkimer County—and that is the county the census taker remembered and wrote down. But even John’s father’s family did not live in Herkimer (see below).
That census also shows John as having lived in Mexico, NY for nine years. But in the 1850 census, five years prior, he is living in Ellisburg. His father had relocated the family to Ellisburg in 1842 and John married there about 1846.
When a census is this far off for one family, it is a safe bet that others in that locale also will have errors. And sure enough! Two of Luke’s stepchildren living in his household are incorrectly given his last name—and only ever in this one census.
In the 1865 census, John’s father Luke and second wife Sally are listed as being born in Oneida County. But Luke’s War of 1812 record, and the 1855 census, shows that he was born in Schenectady County. He was drafted in Schenectady County in the summer of 1812 and spent the last half of that year in Sackett’s Harbor, NY. He would have marched through Orwell on the way and evidently that is where he stopped on the way back, and stayed. (Sally probably was born in Oneida County since that appears more than once in her records.)
This list could go on. But the point is that it is important to rely on more than one source of information. Censuses were neither designed nor expected to be perfectly accurate.
The Wessels will be part of the chapter on Frank and Mary Wessels Ackley.
[1] See, for example, Chapman Brothers (1885), Portrait and biographical album of Whiteside County Illinois, Chicago: Chapman brothers, p. 273 on James Wessel.
Family history research projects seem to present new challenges with each new generation. It is easy to get lost—and I hope posting a few tips as I go along will help others avoid common mistakes.
The Latin word “ditto” was once common in our American English language, as recently at 50 years ago. It means “to say the same” or simply “the same.” It appears often in historical documents and seems almost as often to be incorrectly transcribed. I have run across two examples in the past week on Ancestry.com. Both change the meaning of the record and create unnecessary confusion.
In the first example, deaths are listed in a column that uses “do” rather than repeating the full text of cause of death. The pic shows that some died of “Fits” and some, including David Ackley, died of “Poison.”[1] But only the first entry in each category shows the full word, the rest use “do” instead. The way people using quill pens wrote “do” can it make it hard to decipher—as the image suggests. In this case, “do” appears transcribed on Ancestry.com as “C”—which is completely wrong. (I am not sure the record is correct but, if not, it is a mistake made in 1850 and a different issue.)
This transcription can be misleading in another way. The census was done in JUNE 1850 for the previous 12 months. The record shows that David died in July, but it was July 1849 because July 1850 had not yet happened. This is clear in the original document, but not in the Ancestry summary.
In the second example, my 2nd great grandfather Arthur (oldest brother of David) appears in a city directory for the county of Oswego in 1869. He owned 34 acres of land near New Centreville (which originally used the British spelling). His address was not “34 Do.”
Arthur’s youngest brother Andrew’s address was not “10 Sandbank” (which should be Sand Bank, two words, renamed Altmar in 1895). He owned 10 acres near Sand Bank.
Anyone looking for a street named “Do” or “Sandbank” will be busy for a long time.
The moral of the story: when using online genealogy sources, it is important be mindful that many of these transcriptions are done using artificial intelligence—at least I hope humans are not directly responsible. Reading the original is crucial—the original of the directory clearly explains that the numbers indicate acres owned. The confusion created by “do” shows that knowing about language used in old documents also can be important.
[1] More on that in a blog post to appear this week.
For reasons not clear, Lulu press has been extremely slow in filling orders. I have used this vendor for years, but lately it’s beyond frustrating. However, Discovering Nicholas Ackley now also is available from Amazon and from Barnes and Noble, both promising a relatively quick turn-around time. This may be a better option and I apologize to anyone who has been experiencing a long wait from Lulu (as have I!).
In early February, the book also should be available online from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
From the back cover
Nicholas Ackley was born about 1630, most likely in the East Anglia area of England to Puritan parents. He arrived in Hartford, Connecticut about 1650, joining a town of about 800 people. In 1653, he thought briefly about leaving with two dozen other young men to start a new town 40 miles to the north. Instead, about two years later, he bought a parcel in Hartford at what became 42 Trumbull Street, complete with house, outbuildings, orchard and garden. That same year, he married Hannah and children soon began to arrive.
In 1662, he was one of 28 young men who agreed to carve a new town out of the wilderness on the Connecticut River at Thirty Mile Island. He moved the family to his 14-acre plot in 1667, locating with about 10 other families at the southern end of what became Haddam.
The Ackleys started from scratch, clearing the land, constructing the house and outbuildings, and preparing the land for farming. About 30 homes were built in Haddam by 1670, a small town compared to Hartford, and a day’s ride from the nearest larger town.
Additional children arrived in rapid succession. In all, 10 Ackley children, 5 boys and 5 girls, survived to adulthood. The children settled nearby, many in the new town of East Haddam, and produced about three dozen grandchildren.
Hannah died in the mid-l680s and Nicholas married the widow Miriam. Less than a decade later, Nicholas Ackley went on to his final adventure, dying on 29 April 1695 in Haddam.
Nearly half a millennium later, interest in genealogy has exploded as has misinformation about Nicholas Ackley and his family. Myths and errors about his life are splashed over various family history sites on the internet. This book identifies the documented facts available about Nicholas and his family, and uses the norms and customs of the time to discuss what else might be true. It sets the Ackleys in the context of early Connecticut, providing a richer view of their lives than just names and dates.
Originally, I created this website as a convenient base for the book Discovering Nicholas Ackley. But even before the book appears (very soon!), it is clear to me that a blog could be useful in communicating more frequently and in somewhat greater depth. This is not the first Ackley blog, and for all things Ackley, Mike Ackley’s blog still holds top billing: https://ackleyfamilygenealogy.blogspot.com/
My blog will focus on aspects of Nicholas, some of his children, and then only my line of descent—from James and Elizabeth in the early 1700s on down to my grandparents Arthur and Ruth in the 1900s. I intend to provide glimpses into the lives – and the times – of the Ackleys and recount my experiences and lessons learned in researching family histories.
The frustration with a myriad of just plain wrong information that prompted me to write the Nicholas book did not end with that publication. Enough reliable information is out there to paint a good portrait of most of our ancestors, without perpetuating reliance on impossible facts. One goal of this blog is to identify some of the critical pitfalls in genealogical research and suggest how to work through them by providing examples. And I will point out that it is perfectly acceptable to have gaps—not knowing Hannah’s last name does not mean she needs to be provided with a fictitious one, for example.
My intent is to include much more information on the female side of the family than usually is done, although that research is difficult and the resources are exceedingly sparse. Yes, we all trace the male lines, but only because female histories are so difficult to trace back earlier than about the mid-1800s. The three books I published in 2021 are all families on my mother’s side—and her mother’s side, and her mother’s mother’s side.
I make mistakes, like all of us. If any reader thinks I have an incorrect fact or have misinterpreted something, please say so.
And if you have an Ackley gem such as an old Bible with family members recorded in spidery handwriting—l would love to know about it. Puzzle clues are always welcome. The page below is an example, a Bible page for Lot Ackley, my 3rd great grandfather. It is the starting point for research on him, next year. The descendant chart below the Bible image shows that I already have filled in some of the missing dates, but much is left to discover.
Discovering Nicholas Ackley 