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 It appears often in historical documents and seems almost as often to be incorrectly transcribed.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.
Perhaps only Nicholas-1 (c1630-1695), the first Ackley in America, experienced as much change in the world around him as did Abel (abt 1746-1835). In his early years, Abel lived among the descendants of the first settlers of Connecticut, mostly English and mostly Puritan. Before he reached 21, he had lost both parents, taken his younger sister by the hand and moved them both to the frontier (western CT/eastern NY) where they had relatives. This area was being settled by a diverse group, including Moravians from Germany, Huguenots from France, and Quakers never welcome in Connecticut.
Abel clearly adapted. He soon married Hannah, whose family had originated in France. About a decade later, he was on the move again, looking for better opportunities. He relocated the family to the area near Saratoga, NY, just in time for the Revolutionary War. Abel was part of the militia, as he had been 15 years earlier in the French and Indian War. After the war, he experienced the creation of the new nation as a man with a settled family life, raising his children and marrying once more after Hannah’s death in the late 1790s. By the time Abel died in 1835, the Erie Canal had been built, further transforming New York state, and the first steam engine trains were appearing.
This chapter will be part of the next published book, which will include Abel’s father Nicholas-2 and grandfather James. Each chapter includes details about the major events in the life of the man and his family and information about the times in which they lived. The chapter on Abel includes a brief summary, a table of events and dates, and a full discussion of the lives of the family. Appendices include additional detail on children, appearance in censuses, and Abel’s participation in the Revolutionary War.
Although the information is as complete, and as accurate, as possible, I may not have turned over every rock. I am very interested in any information others may have. Please feel free to contact me with comments or questions.
Abel’s generation is the fourth in my line, beginning with Nicholas (1630-1695). The chapter on Abel’s life will appear shortly, with more complete information and full references. Summaries for Abel and Hannah appear below.
1779 Map–may not be entirely accurate. Abel and Hannah Ackley lived in the area of the red circle.
Abel Ackley served in the French and Indian War in 1762 with his father Nicholas (1708-1763). He was at least 16 at the time, making his year of birth no later than 1746. After the death of his father, Abel (then abt 17) and his younger sister Sarah (then 14) left Colchester, CT for Sharon, CT where they had relatives (the offspring of Sarah Spencer, who had sued James and Elizabeth Ackley for slander). In Jan 1766, he married Hannah Shevalier whose father had immigrated from Jersey, Channel Islands. The Ackleys lived near Amenia, Dutchess County, NY where sons Arthur (1766-1848) and Solomon (1774-1861) were born (and possibly other children).
About 1775, Abel moved his family to the area where he lived until his death, White Creek, Washington County, NY. There, he served in the militia during the Revolutionary War probably at the time of the Battles of Saratoga in 1777. His son Lot West Ackley (1788-1854) was born in White Creek, as was his daughter Sophia (1777-1869), who married Elias Kelsey. Abel owned a small farm, which appears on the tax rolls in 1802 and 1803. Hannah died before the 1800 census, where she does not appear. In about 1815, Abel married Mary (1767-1850), probably a widow. He died at the age of 89 on 12 March 1835 (estate papers finalized in 1838). Mary died in 1850 at age 83.
Hannah Shevalier Ackley was born on 14 March 1745 to Elias Shevalier, a Huguenot immigrant from Jersey, Channel Islands, and Mary Adams (1714-1770) in Pomfret, CT. Between 1747 and 1750, Elias moved the family to Amenia, Dutchess County, NY. The Shevaliers had ten known children. Hannah married Abel Ackley (abt 1746-1835) on 16 January 1766; her brother Elias, Jr. (1742-1768) had married Abel’s sister Sarah (1749-?) on 17 October 1765. (Sarah’s fate after Elias Jr’s death is unknown.)
Hannah and Abel lived in the Amenia area until about 1775, welcoming Arthur (1766-1848) and Solomon (1774-1861) and possibly other children. The Ackleys moved to what is now White Creek, Washington County, NY in about 1775 where Sophia (1777-1869) and my direct ancestor Lot West (1788-abt 1854) were born. Hannah does not appear in the 1800 census, or after, so likely died before that census was taken. Her father’s will, dated 1805, notes that she is deceased and leaves a sum to her children.
Map source: Sauthier, C. J. (1779). A chorographical map of the province of New York in North America: divided into counties, manors, patents, and townships: exhibiting likewise all the private grants of land made and located in that province. London: William Fadden. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2018588054/.
The chapter on the next in line, James’s son Nicholas-2 Ackley, is now available (clickhere).
The first three Nicholases
Children named after parents or other relatives can have the advantage for the family historian of helping distinguish among families, but it also can create confusion. Online Ackley family histories sometimes conflate three Nicholases: Nicholas-1, the immigrant (abt 1630-1695); Nicholas-2 (1708-1763), the son of Nicholas-1’s son James; and Nicholas-3 (1762-?), the son of Nicholas-2.
Nicholas-2 Ackley
In some ways, Nicholas-2 Ackley was even more of a challenge to research than his grandfather. Records become harder to find in the 1700s, partly because more people were about and partly because more towns meant more opportunities to lose records over the years. The chapter on Nicholas-2 has a few holes as a result but still provides a good overview of the man, his family and his life.
Nicholas-2 was born on 16 December 1708 in East Haddam to James and Elizabeth Ackley, the second of seven children. James became well off and Nicholas likely lived a comfortable life as a young man. He would have had some memorable experiences: for example, a snowstorm in 1717 that covered houses up to the second story and an earthquake in 1727 (and a bigger one in 1755).
After his own birth and baptism, the first known record of Nicholas-2 is the birth of his son Jeremiah in 1742. Three more sons and two daughters appear in the records, but he may have had more children not recorded. The known lists of official town records include only his last two sons and second wife. An older secondary source captures three of the four children from his first marriage, a son and two daughters, and his first wife’s given name. (See table below.)
The 1730s and 1740s were a time of serious economic difficulties in the Connecticut colony. Nicholas-2 likely struggled to make ends meet. He does not appear to have been a farmer and probably earned a living as a skilled or semi-skilled worker. At the time of his father’s death in 1746, he owed the estate a considerable sum, mostly forgiven in the will (see that chapter).
In March 1757, at age 49, Nicholas-2 enlisted in the provincial troops as part of the British effort in the French and Indian War (1755-1763)—possibly for the steady income. He enlisted in four of those years, for terms that lasted about 7-9 months. (Provincial troops were recruited anew each year.) He died at 54 in late May or early June 1763, just months after his last term of service. The chapter includes a description of which battles Nicholas and the other eleven Connecticut Ackley men experienced.
Those darned rumors!
Once again, the research for the chapter uncovered persistent mistakes. Three stand out:
Nicholas-1 never fought in a war. Nicholas-2 fought in the French and Indian War, dying in 1763, well before the Revolutionary War. Nicholas-3 was born in 1762 at the end of the French and Indian War and so clearly did not fight in that. He did fight in the Revolutionary War. Nicholas-3 was the only “Pvt”–before that war only officers were given a rank designation.
Nicholas-2’s wife was not Jerusha Graves—that was his first cousin; she died before any of Nicholas-2’s children were born.
Nicholas-2’s son Jeremiah did not die in Erie County, NY in 1817, but tragically young at 19 in 1761 in East Haddam, CT. He also obviously could not have signed the 1776 Loyalist petition in New York City.
Map: Park, M. and W.P. Lansdowne (1766). To the right honourable, the Earl of Shelbourne, His Majesty’s principal Secretary of State for the Southern Department. This plan of the colony of Connecticut in North-America. [N.P] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/73691553/ Scale ca. 1:275,000.
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.
Gustav Ludvig Jungberg alias Gustave Anjou (1863-1942)
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]
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.
[1] L.P. Haight, 1949, The life of Charles Henry Hackley: drawn from old public and family records, Muskegon, MI: Dana Printing Company.
[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.
Discovering Nicholas Ackley was just the beginning of my journey through the Ackley family history in my ancestry. I had intended to spend less time on the others in the distant past, but curiosity has a way of taking over.
James Ackley’s signature and seal on his will
As it became obvious that it will take several months to complete the next book, I decided to release each draft chapter as it is completed, at least through the 1700s. This allows those who are interested early access and may have the added benefit of encouraging readers to contact me with any information I may not have found.
Generation 2 is Nicholas’s son James and his wife Elizabeth. Discovering James Ackleyis available by clicking here.
Dates of birth and maiden names of female ancestors often are undiscoverable, something that many amateur family historians find difficult to accept. In the modern era, we have become used to women being clearly identified in official records. It is easy to forget that this was far from true in colonial Connecticut.
As an example, in my line of Ackleys, the original families of the women in the first three generations remain unidentified: Hannah and Miriam, the wives of Nicholas-1 (abt 1630-1695); Elizabeth, the wife of James (abt 1677-1746); and Jerusha(?), the first wife of Nicholas-2 (1708-1763).[1]
A typical Puritan wedding: a civil ceremony with a small group in attendance
Sadly, online Ackley family histories routinely misidentify each of these women. This is unnecessary. Although available verifiable facts may not solve the puzzle, they can eliminate some possibilities and avoid perpetuating mistakes. We owe these hardy female ancestors the time it takes to sort through the puzzles pieces and toss those that just do not fit.
In a previous post, I outlined the common mistakes made about Elizabeth Ackley. I will be taking a closer look at Jerusha in a later post, but already know that she cannot be the Jerusha Graves so many online histories cite as the wife of Nicholas-2.
Hannah and Miriam, Wives of Nicholas-1 Ackley
Discovering Nicholas Ackley devotes several pages to exploring who Hannah[2] might have been, and includes a shorter section on Nicholas-1’s second wife, Miriam. What follows is a brief summary; please see Discovering Nicholas Ackley for additional details and a full list of sources, or contact me.
Hannah Ackley
Nicholas likely married Hannah, in 1655, although no record of the marriage itself exists. Marriages in Puritan Hartford were not the church affair most might assume. The Puritans saw marriage as a covenant, a legal contract between the man and the woman. It was a magistrate or other civil official who performed marriages, not a pastor or other church functionary. Puritans insisted couples marry for love because strong families, with faithful spouses, were seen as the bedrock of their way of life. The average age for women to marry in the colonies at that time was 23, based on the idea that younger women might lack the mature judgment required to select a life-long spouse.[3]
Where Hannah originated is unknown and the possibilities are extensive. So many more men than women had migrated to the New World in the 1630s and early 1640s that the ratio of men to women in Hartford was two to one. By 1640, the average age for men to marry was 30 because of the shortage of women.[4] Although it had begun to even out, the shortage still was serious when Nicholas married in the mid-1650s. Hannah, then, might have come from elsewhere in the colony or even recently arrived from England. It not impossible that they had travelled over together, well chaperoned, or even met on the voyage. It is unlikely Hannah travelled alone, however.
The possibilities of Hannah’s origin that are mentioned most often are as follows.
Hannah “Ford”
That maiden name for her does not appear in any of the references based on old town records.[5] A complication is that maiden names invariably were dropped once the woman married. However, it does not seem likely that Hannah was a Ford.
Not Hannah Ford born in Dorchester, County Dorset, England. Although this birthplace and date turn up in numerous online genealogies, this is not our Hannah. Thomas Ford of Windsor, Connecticut did have a daughter named Hannah born in Dorchester, England on 1 Feb 1628/9. But that Hannah died in England on 28 March 1629, just weeks after her birth.[6] (Thomas arrived in CT about 1635.)
Not Hannah Ford of Trumbull Street. A second possibility is that she was the daughter of the Thomas Ford who was admitted in 1649 as an inhabitant of Hartford with the address of Lot 42 on Trumbull Street.[7] This is the same property where Nicholas was living in 1655 when he was admitted as an inhabitant and where he lived with Hannah until his move to Haddam in 1667.
Is that a coincidence, or not?
A “Lot 42 Hannah Ford” is possible only if there were two Thomas Fords. But there were not. The only Thomas Ford who immigrated was the one noted above from Dorchester, England, whose only daughter named Hannah died shortly after her birth. It is a mystery as to why Ford owned the property in Hartford (see appendix 3 in Discovering Nicholas Ackley), but it is certain that he cannot have been the father of our Hannah.
According to Banks,[8] three other Fords did immigrate to the New England colonies between 1630 and 1650: John to Weymouth, Stephen to the Isles of Shoals, and William to Plymouth.[9]
John Ford arrived unmarried in Weymouth in 1635. He would have had to marry almost immediately to produce a Hannah old enough to marry Nicholas in 1655, unlikely although not impossible. A widow would have been too old to have produced Nicholas’s last child about 1677.
Stephen Ford emigrated to the Isles of Shoals but no more information about him is readily available. Given the location, he is unlikely to have been Hannah’s father.
William Ford arrived in Plymouth in 1621; he did marry a woman named Hannah. But she was still his wife when she died in the 1680s and none of his daughters was named Hannah.
With the idea that perhaps the old handwriting had been misread, I also looked at similar last names in the Hartford area, e.g., Lord. No Hannahs.
Hannah “Ford Mitchell”
The online Ackley family genealogies that list Hannah Ford Mitchell as Nicholas’s wife appear to refer to two different Hannahs. One was born in 1614, but died in 1650, about five years before Nicholas married. The other Hannah supposedly was born anywhere between 1629 and 1639, dates for which I have yet to find any source. Any date later than 1636 is probably too late, but not impossible. As noted above, the Puritans strongly discouraged early marriage.
The “Ford Mitchell” part of this name is never clearly explained.[10] Children were not given middle names for about another hundred years and women did not use their maiden names as middle names after marriage (how I wish they had!). Middle names do not appear in the records from early Connecticut.
Some Ackley family histories suggest Hannah was the widow of a Mitchell. For that to be true, her first husband had to have lived but briefly after the marriage. That a first husband died would be more likely than divorce, which was rare and took years. Had there been a first husband who died, however, probate would have been undertaken and the widow listed by name. No such probate record exists, and such records are remarkably complete for Connecticut at this time.
Mitchell appears as a name in several colonial Connecticut towns. John Mitchell, a barber, lived in early Hartford in Nicholas’s time.[11] In fact, Nicholas sold one of his Hartford properties to him in 1668. None of John Mitchell’s daughters, however, was named Hannah and all were still unmarried at his death in 1683. A Mitchell also lived in Wethersfield, not far away, but none of his daughters or wives was named Hannah. Neither Mitchell had a son who could have been a first husband of Hannah. A different Mitchell, from a more distant town, is a slight possibility.
I also attempted to locate a possible Hannah (or Hanna, or Hana, or Anna) by looking through all available probate records for the early settlers, which regularly listed all their children. The sprinkling of Hannahs I found either were too young or married to someone else. Any widows of a similar name also were unavailable.
A final possibility is that Hannah was the daughter of one of the few servants brought to the colonies. If that were the case, looking for her name among the early settlers would be pointless. The names of servants rarely were recorded in official documents.
For now, then, Hannah’s parentage remains unknown. What we do know of her is that she had to have been a strong woman to have met the challenges of the time and produced as many as 12 children, 10 of whom survived to adulthood.
Miriam
Hannah died in about 1687. In about 1688, Nicholas married his second wife, Miriam,[12] who is just as much of a mystery as Hannah.
All we know about Miriam is that she was a widow. We have no idea of Miriam’s age or whether she had children from her earlier marriage. No children from her first marriage are listed in the probate of Nicholas’s estate, but they would not have been entitled to any of the estate and so would not be mentioned. (Nicholas died without a will.) She and Nicholas did not have children, but that does not necessarily reveal her age.
Some Ackley family genealogies list Miriam’s surname as “Moore” at the time she married Nicholas. The source for that is unclear since records from the time note only that she was Nicholas’s second wife and do not list surname.[13] One false lead now discounted is that she was the Miriam Moore who was the daughter of Miles and Isabel Joyner Moore of New London. This Miriam married John Willey in 1670. In 1687, he moved with his family to the part of Haddam that became East Haddam, where some of the Ackley sons were settling. He died in May 1688, the year Nicholas married again. But Miriam Moore Willey married Samuel Spencer in 1689, not Nicholas Ackley.[14]
What happened to Miriam after Nicholas’s death in 1695 is unknown. Some of the children still were living at home and she may have remained with them at the homestead until it was sold three years later.
My search for Miriam was somewhat less thorough than for Hannah since she is not a direct ancestor. I did search various sources and probate records for “Miriam” or variations on that name. I found none with dates or marital status that would fit.
For many of these strong, remarkable female ancestors, then, we have very few facts. It is not impossible that records may yet be found, but every lead needs to be checked and rechecked. Knowing more about the culture of the time can help determine whether a particular fact could be true.
If anyone has any new information on any of these women in the Ackley family history, I would be thrilled to see it. Please contact me using the form on this website.
Copies of Discovering Nicholas Ackley are available on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and from Lulu.com.
[1] The maiden name of his second wife is recorded.
[2] I have not seen any original documents showing that this was her name, but am accepting on faith that some ancient family history recorded that correctly.
[3] See DH Fischer, 1989, Albion’s seed: four British folkways in America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 78-69
[4] JT Main, 1985, Society and economy in colonial Connecticut, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 5
[5] The LDS/Ancestry database, while useful for clues, does not purport to be definitive and is based on family histories and recollection as well as primary sources. In the case of Hannah, it simply perpetuates misinformation.
[6] Dorset Holy Trinity Church, n.d., Dorset parish registers, 1559‐1812, Dorchester, England: Dorset History Centre.
[7] WS Porter, 1842, Historical notices of Connecticut, no.1: Hartford, Hartford: Elihu Geer’s Press, p. 37.
[8] CE Banks, 1963, Topographical dictionary of 2885 English emigrants to New England, 1620‐1650, Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co.
[9] The information about John, Stephen and William Ford is from a search on Ancestry.com, so not exhaustive but enough to discount them as likely sources.
[10] It likely is just coincidence that Thomas Ford once owned Lot 42 on Trumbull Street, which Nicholas later bought, and that Nicholas sold his upland Hartford property to John Mitchell – “Ford” and “Mitchell” or “Ford Mitchell”. But this may well be the source of those last names being associated with Hannah.
[11] JH Trumbull (ed.), 1886, The memorial history of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633–1884, vol. I. Boston: Edward J. Osgood, p. 275
[12] At least it is certain this was her given name since she is identified by name in Nicholas’s estate probate.
[13] It is possible that a source exists and I have not found it. Any mentions of “Moore” that I have seen do not indicate the source of information.
[14] OJ Harvey, 1899, The Harvey book: giving the genealogies of certain branches of the American families of Harvey, Nesbitt, Dixon and Jameson, and notes on many other families, together with numerous biographical sketches, Wilkes-Barre, PA: E.B. Yordy & Co, pp. 595-596.
James Ackley was the youngest of Nicholas Ackley’s children. As with James’s mother Hannah (post to come or see Discovering Nicholas Ackley), the parentage and year of birth of James’s wife Elizabeth remains a mystery.
Various Ackley family histories claim to provide the answer about Elizabeth’s parentage, but none provides any clear proof and most, perhaps unwittingly, present false information. As is explained below, even Elizabeth’s age at death may not be what is recorded on her gravestone.
Elizabeth Ackley’s gravestone, Old Cove Burying Ground, East Haddam, CT
About her parentage: The extensive online Ackley family genealogy has her born in 1689 in East Haddam to Nathaniel Comedy and his wife Mary Bachelder.[1] This includes numerous errors. Mary Bachelder was married to Nathaniel Cowdrey and they did not have a daughter named Elizabeth. It was their son Nathaniel Cowdrey, Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Parker who had a daughter named Elizabeth Cowdrey, born in Reading, MA on 6 Oct 1689[2]. This Elizabeth married Timothy Goodwin in Reading, MA in 1708.[3] So this cannot be our Elizabeth, who gave birth to James’s first child in 1707. These errors, however, appear again and again in online Ackley family genealogies.
Other considerations would suggest this is not our Elizabeth. NoNathaniel Cowdrey family lived in East Haddam at the time. The Nathaniel Cowdrey, Jr. above could not have moved to East Haddam because he died shortly after his daughter’s birth. According to his probate papers,[4] Nathaniel Cowdrey, Jr. died in 1690 in the “Expedition to Canada” in King William’s War and was a resident of Reading at that time. His widow married Jeremiah Swayne/Swain of Reading shortly thereafter; they both died in 1696.[5] IN 1697, Hannaniah Parker was granted guardianship for his “Grand Daughter Elizabeth Cowdrey Daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth [Parker] Cowdrey late of Redding in sd County of Middx Deced Intestate. She being a minor of about 8 years of age.”[6] That Elizabeth, then, most likely continued to live with her great grandfather after her parents’ deaths until her marriage to Goodwin and never lived in East Haddam, CT.
Our Elizabeth Ackley is not this Elizabeth Cowdrey, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Elizabeth had become a common name. Could she have been another Elizabeth Cowdrey? The answer is “no.” I suspect the original choice of Cowdrey was because someone discovered a birth year for an Elizabeth that coincided with the age listed on Elizabeth Ackley’s gravestone. No Cowdrey family, however, appears in East Haddam vital records before 1733 when a daughter, Huldah, was born to Nathaniel and Mehittabell. This couple would have been the age of James and Elizabeth’s children; they could not have been the parents of James’s wife Elizabeth.[7],[8]
Probate records for early Connecticut capture about 80-85% of actual deaths, according to Main, but much closer to all of those for men with families.[9] A search through the three volumes of Manwaring’s probate abstracts showed no probates for any Cowdreys at all during the period 1635–1750 and included no names that might easily be mistaken for Cowdrey.[10],[11] It is extremely unlikely that a Cowdrey family settled in Connecticut would not have had at least one probate recorded for a family member during that time. It is almost impossible for Elizabeth to have been the daughter of Connecticut Cowdreys.
So was she a Comedy? I suspect that was a misreading of some spidery scribble of Cowdrey. A look through the vital records reveals absolutely no Comedys living in or near New England at that time—using any spelling imaginable (e.g. Comety, Camady, Comede, etc.). The probate records also do not contain a Comedy, by any spelling.
Elizabeth Ackley’s parentage, then, remains a mystery.
About her year of birth: To be in the 66th year of her life at her death on 19 September 1755, Elizabeth would have had to be born after 19 September 1689. This fits with the 6 October 1689 date often cited in Ackley family histories, but we have established above that this birth date belongs to a different Elizabeth. Note also that gravestones can be wrong, and too often are. It is possible Elizabeth Ackley was not the age claimed on the stone, but a few years older.
The first child of James and Elizabeth (James Jr.) was born in July 1707. At the latest, then, the couple married in 1706. If Elizabeth was born in 1689, she would have been 16 or 17 at the time (depending on the actual month/day of her birth and marriage). Although women were marrying earlier than in Nicholas’s day, this is very young and 22 was the average age for women to marry.[12]
The cadence of the birth of Elizabeth’s children also seems unusual. She would have been 32 at the birth of her sixth child and 39 with the seventh and last (see table). An apparent seven-year gap during peak childbearing years would be unusual as would having a final child at a relatively young 39.[13]
I suspect Elizabeth may have been as much as five years older than the gravestone claims. Why the discrepancy? It is possible she claimed to be younger than she was, or perhaps the person ordering the stone was uncertain about her actual age. Again, it is not unusual for gravestones to be incorrect.
Elizabeth’s birth year matters because an incorrect year would make finding her maiden name even more challenging by, say, looking for all Elizabeths born in the area in a particular year. This may well be the genesis of the Elizabeth Cowdrey mistake.
Even knowing her birth year might not solve the question of her parentage. Old records very often are incomplete: the record of her birth may have been recorded in a ledger not yet discovered or lost entirely. The record of her marriage to James also has not been found.
We do not know, then, who Elizabeth’s parents were; and we cannot be certain about her year of birth or marriage. Although this may frustrate some, it is just the nature of genealogy. Not knowing these facts does not change who she was. But giving her a maiden name and parentage that is not hers does her an injustice, particularly when verifiable facts are readily available to rule out obvious errors.
[5] Ancestry, 2018: Reading Deaths, p. 596. As noted in Discovering Nicholas Ackley, this was one of the worse years of the Little Ice Age and starvation or illness because of poor diet and extreme weather caused many deaths.
[8] A Cowdrey does marry an Ackley: Loren Cowdrey marries Sarah Ackley in East Hampton, CT two hundred years later, in 1819. Ancestry.com, 2013: East Hampton church records.
[13] Of course, later pregnancies could have been unsuccessful.
References
Ancestry.com (2011). Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988: Reading Births.
Ancestry.com (2018). Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Birth, Marriage, and Death Records, 1700-1850: Reading Deaths.
Main, JTM. (1985) Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Manwaring, CW. (1904a). A digest of the early Connecticut probate records: Hartford district, 1687-1695. Hartford, CT, R.S. Peck & Co. Printers.
Manwaring, CW. (1904b). A digest of the early Connecticut probate records: Hartford District, 1700-1729. Harford, CT, R.S. Peck & Co.
Manwaring, CW. (1904c). A digest of the early Connecticut probate records: Hartford District, 1729-1750. Harford, CT, R.S. Peck & Co.
Mehling, MBA. (1911). Cowdrey-Cowdery-Cowdary genealogy: William Cowdery of Lynn, Massachusetts, 1603 and his descendants. New York, NY, Frank Allaben Genealogical Company.
White, LC, Ed. (1997). The Barbour Collection of Connecticut town vital records: East Haddam, 1743-1857. Baltimore, MD, Genealogical Publishing Co.
An earlier post included information about allegations of witchery made against Sarah Spencer by her brother James Ackley and his wife Elizabeth. The story is not quite as presented there, or as told by most of those who have written about this incident in Ackley family history. This post is an excerpt from a draft of a chapter on James and tells the story based on the court records which I now have read in the original longhand.
James’s sister Sarah, older by about 17 years, married William Spencer in 1687.[1] He died in East Haddam in February 1713,[2] leaving Sarah with four children at home, ages about 6 to 18.[3] The oldest child, Mary, then 26, had married Jonathan Dunham about 1708.[4] For reasons lost to history, Dunham attempted to have a will he claimed was written by William Spencer accepted as the true will; the court denied the motion and appointed Sarah administratrix.[5] She and Dunham jointly posted the £200 bond.[6] It is not clear why the issue of the will arose, but it certainly was unusual.[7]
The inventory of the estate was compiled and signed by three men, one of whom was Sarah’s brother James Ackley, also of East Haddam. As was typical of those days, however, William Spencer’s estate was not fully probated and distributed until two years later, in February 1715.[8] (Avoiding the delay could have been the plan behind the purported will noted above.) The final probate is somewhat unclear, but it appears that the homestead already had been sold. The probate officially allotted the proceeds to Sarah and the oldest son, Alexander, for whom Sarah served as legal guardian.[9] Eldest sons always were granted a double share and Alexander and Sarah’s shares together amounted to about two-thirds of the £112 estate.[10]
Sarah did not remarry and was working to support herself and the children still at home. Alexander would have been able to work, but probably not enough to support the family alone. Sarah, then, likely struggled. She may have done laundry, sewed, cooked and performed similar domestic services to make a living. It may be that she asked her prosperous brother James for assistance, which would have been very proper and, indeed, expected.
Family histories sometimes misrepresent what happened next, and I misunderstood it until I read the actual court documents.[11] Sarah was never tried as a witch, but she was accused by Elizabeth of being one and the charge was discussed at court.
As background, note that by 1723 the witch hysteria that had waxed and waned in New England since the 1630s had subsided to almost nothing. Laws had been put in place to ensure that the mistakes of the past would not be repeated. It thus was very unlikely that any serious harm to Sarah would result even if a court case for witchery was brought; but the legally the penalty still was death.
The story is as follows.
In 1723, Elizabeth Ackley reportedly publicly accused Sarah Spencer of being a witch and harassing and tormenting her. She evidently described Sarah’s alleged attacks on her in vivid detail at a public gathering at the home of Captain Thomas Gates.
By 1724, Sarah had moved from East Haddam to Colchester. But her reputation as a witch, she claimed, followed her. Early that year, she sued Elizabeth and James for slander, requesting substantial damages to support an “aging widow”[12] whose reputation and ability to earn a living, receive credit, and live “comfortably” among her neighbors had been seriously damaged by the allegations. She even had her pastor write a note attesting her to be a person of “good religion and virtue,” which she claimed she kept with her and had to use. It undoubtedly was true that a charge of witchcraft, complete with a dramatic telling of its effects in public, could have a deleterious effect and may have discouraged Sarah’s customers. One telling would set off rumors that would reverberate around a small town, probably embellished a little more with each telling.
In the court proceedings, testimony by Captain Gates corroborated Sarah’s allegations about Elizabeth’s public charges. Testimony also verified that James had threatened Sarah, saying, in effect, that she had no reason to fear him but that he would give her a reason to fear him if she came near him again. For her part, Elizabeth claimed temporary insanity, alleging that she had not realized what she was saying. That is probably the only part of this story that is wholly false, and the court agreed.
Initially Sarah won the case with a huge award of £500. On appeal, the award was reduced more than once until it was just a few pennies and court costs.
The whole incident, then, was nothing more than a nasty family feud. Unfortunately, it was one played out on the stage of history where it will forever be remembered as the last witchcraft accusation to be part of a court case in Connecticut.[13] But it was a slander accusation, not a “witch trial.”
What happened to Sarah later is not clear, but she may have moved again. In 1726, which would have been just after the close of the slander proceedings, a Sarah Spencer appears as a communicant in the Congregational Church in Windham, CT.[14] In 1733, a Sarah Spencer dies in Windham at age “abt 73 y.”, which would have made her birth year about 1660 or 1661.[15] Windham is about 25 miles from Colchester, far enough to be away from the James Ackleys, but close enough to be a manageable move for an aging woman. The age at death fits with the likely birth year of Nicholas’s daughter Sarah, and 1726 is shortly after the conclusion of the slander trial. This may have been our Sarah.
Sarah’s family’s involvement with James’s family, however, does not end here. The next interaction is a happier one. It takes place in the newly founded town of Sharon, CT and involves Jonathan and Mary Dunham, Alexander Spencer, and the son and daughter of James’s son Nicholas. The son’s name is Abel and his sister’s is—Sarah.
Footnotes are as they will appear in the publication. If you wish to have a full reference for any or all of them, please contact meor download the draft chapter here.
[6] This was required for all wills by the early 1700s and was intended to prevent the administrators from disposing of the estate before it was legally distributed and so denying the heirs of their just inheritance.
[7] I have not found a copy of the purported will so who it most benefited remains a mystery.
[9] The probate granted legal guardianship of Alexander to Sarah at his request, a common practice. He was 18 at the time of his father’s death but only 5 months short of 21 on the date of the granting of guardianship in the final probate.
[10] The youngest son William received land; daughters Mary, Sarah and Hannah received about £15 each.
[11] These are available via microfiche from the archives at the Connecticut State Library. The handwriting makes it impossible to decipher every word, but it is clear enough to develop an accurate understanding. See CLS, 1913.
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!).
Discovering Nicholas Ackley 