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.
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.
In progress is the last of the chapters in my Ackley lineage that will be publicly available. The Frank Ackley chapter is massive, including not only his family and children, but also the extended families of his wife Mary Wessels Ackley. Her father is the descendant of Dutch immigrants who settled near Albany, NY in the mid-1600s. His grandfather, Luke Wessels, fought in the War of 1812 in Sacketts Harbor, NY and remained in the area, settling initially in Orwell, NY. Mary’s mother left Ireland as a child with her parents, Dennis and Priscilla Donovan, arriving in Kingston, Canada in 1847 and migrating across the St. Lawrence to New Centreville, NY in about 1865. Tracking both those families has been an adventure!
Please feel free to contact me with questions about this Ackley line. I will do my best to be helpful.
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.
Discovering Nicholas Ackley 