Tag Archives: Ackleys in the 1900s

The First Eight Ackley Generations in America: Summary

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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.

N.A. Mattison, ©2023

Ackely family history migration
1813 base map available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2011587198

Now available: Frank and Mary Ackley, Generation 7

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

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

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

A summary of the story follows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 N.A. Mattison, ©2023

Coming soon: Frank (1854-1934) and Mary (1871-1951) Ackley

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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 Great, Except When They Are Wrong

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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.