Category Archives: Generation 5: Lot and Elizabeth Ackley

Update on Ackley Books and eBooks: All Available Now

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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 Ackley book is available both in print and as 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.

The Discovering 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.

New Information about Elizabeth Taylor Ackley (1793-abt 1875)

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Digging once again through Ackley records that I inherited, new information surfaced about the parents and siblings of Elizabeth Taylor (1793-abt 1875), wife of Lot West Ackley (abt 1788-abt 1854).

The new materials are confusing; one list appears to be the wrong Taylors and as I sort through that, the materials I had originally posted are no longer available.

The one sibling who can be traced reliably is the youngest, Abigail (1796-1864). It was her 12-year-old daughter Lura Ann Baker who wrote a letter in 1842 to her Aunt Elizabeth’s daughter Catherine Ackley, then 18. The letter contains clues about the family, and reveals a girl intrigued by the landscape but also missing friends and family from Sand Bank.

“Montrose, Lee Co, Ioway Terr, May 1, 1842 . . . Father has got 80 acres of prairie land 1 mile from Montrose, 11 miles above the junction of the Des Moines [River] with the Mississippi River. The [Mississippi] river is a mile and a half across at Montrose . . . The prairies now look like great meadows covered with grass and flowers of all colors . . . Send me some pinks seed [a flower] and Sweet Williams [a flower] of all sorts and colors . . . We should be very glad to see any of you or any of our neighbors.”

Lot West Ackley and Elizabeth Taylor Ackley: Draft Chapter Available

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Ackley Family History lineage: Nicholas, James, Nicholas-2, Abel, Lot

Lot West Ackley (1788-abt 1854) definitely got the Ackley “adventure gene.” Born in 1788, six months before the birth of the USA, he married an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (1793-abt 1875) in Washington County, NY in 1812. In 1813, he moved with Elizabeth and their infant daughter 160 miles west to Sand Bank, Oswego County, NY. The area was truly a frontier at the time, even more so than Haddam, CT when Nicholas-1 relocated there in 1667. A few other families from Washington County relocated to Sand Bank at about the same time as Lot and Elizabeth, but the total population could not have been much above 30.

In 1831, Lot and Elizabeth bought property just north of town and settled in. By 1835, they had ten children–and their oldest daughters had married and were starting their own families.

Lot died before an 1854 map of the area was drawn. Elizabeth appears as owner of the property that year and is listed as a widow in the 1855 census. She lived for another 15-20 years with one or another of her children, either on the farm or close by.

This chapter traces the lives of Lot and Elizabeth, setting them in the context of events of their time. It includes several appendices with greater detail. These summarize the lives of each of the ten children; trace participation in the Civil War of seven of their descendants; summarize the available censuses for Lot and Elizabeth; and list the most common errors about them that appear in online family histories.

See the Nicholas’s Descendants page.

Research Tips: “Do” Means “Ditto” Except to A.I.

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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.

Why this blog

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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.