Ackley Family Genealogy: What Are the Origins of the Ackley Surname?

While researching the first post on origins of the Ackley surname, I realized that there was a lot more to learn, so I kept digging and found some more useful information. Although you'll see below that I am far from being able to reach any conclusions as of yet, I've learned some valuable information that will help as I continue to go down this path. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of this approach is to try to discover where the Ackley name and family originated in England, which will hopefully lead us to Nicholas Ackley's English ancestors.

Mapping the Domesday Locations

From the previous post, we know that there were at least 15 locations in the Domesday Book that were variations of the names Ackley or Oakley (keeping in mind that Ackley/Oakley are classified as "local", or location related, surnames). Using that information, I created a map showing all of the locations in England.

Table of Ackley/Oakley Locations from the Domesday Book

Google Map of Ackley/Oakley Locations

As you can see, these locations are scattered all over England, so by themselves they don't offer any special insights that we can take advantage of. And we still don't know for sure if our Ackleys actually came from one of these locations. But, if we were to take a look at the distribution of the surnames we are interested in in the context of where they lived at various points in time, we may learn something useful that could help us narrow down the possibilities.

Surname Distribution

The first step in analyzing surname distributions is to collect information about the number of people with the surname in a given geography. To accomplish this, I collected census data from England for Ackley, Oakley, and several other surnames that have been associated with Ackley (see this post for background), and began by making summary tables for each census year (1841-1911)[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10] for each surname by county. The final product of this activity will be a map for each surname for each census year showing the concentration of the surname in each county in England, from which we can hopefully draw conclusions about the origins of the name. Here is an example of such a map for the Atcherley surname for 1841 from the Atcherley website [1]:

Atcherley Surname Distribution Map 1841 [1]

You can see that there is a county with 56 occurrences of Atcherley in 1841 (Shropshire), there is no other county with more than 11, and most counties have no occurrences at all. Atcherley is known as a Shropshire name, and there are early records there with details of people who had the Atcherley name.

According to Debbie Kennett in her book "The Surnames Handbook, A Guide to Family Name Research in the 21st Century" (which is an excellent book, by the way),

Every surname has its own unique distribution pattern. Rare surnames will often cluster in a particular location near their point of origin. They will slowly diffuse over time into neighbouring areas and the large industrial conurbations. Even today, with increasing mobility, many of these rare surnames can still be found close to the place where they originated. Even the very common surnames do not have an even distribution pattern. The Joneses predominate in Wales, the Campbells in Scotland, the Sullivans in Ireland, and the Johnsons in England. Even Smith, the most common surname in both Britain and America, has its own distinctive pattern, being much less common in Wales and the southwest than elsewhere. [2]

To confirm that we are dealing with a collection of rare surnames, consider the following summary of the occurrences of our surnames of interest:

Frequencies of Ackley and Associated Surnames by Year

You can see that none of the surnames being studied has a very high frequency; only Oakley, the most common name among them, had enough occurrences to be considered somewhat large. The methodology was to search for each surname (exact match) on Ancestry in each of the census years and capture the records that came up. Note that there are some pitfalls to this method -- if there are records that were indexed improperly, the numbers could be incorrect in either direction. Because we are looking for general patterns rather than information about specific families, these inaccuracies shouldn't matter too much if the surname population is large enough (Oakley, for example). However, if the surname is small, such as Ackley, the inaccuracies could give a completely erroneous picture.

For example, I believe the number for Ackley in 1841 is too high by about 18. When you see the data at a more granular level (see table below), you will see that in 1841 there were 18 people named Ackley in the county of Northumberland, but in 1851 there were only 4, and every year after that it was 0, 1, or 2.

Frequency of Ackley Surname in England by County

This looked suspicious to me, so I took a closer look at the data and found that those 18 people in Northumberland were indexed as Ackley in 1841, but were Arkley in 1851 and 1861 (I could tell it was the same families because the names and ages were the same). Digging a little further into the Arkley surname data, I found that this name is almost exclusively a northern England name, occurring most frequently in Northumberland (the northernmost county in England) and Durham (the county immediately south of Northumberland), and very infrequently in the rest of the country. If I had accepted the data as is, I might have concluded that the Ackley surname was more frequent in Northumberland than any other county, which would have steered me in the wrong direction as the analysis progressed.

This exposed a problem that we all know exists -- the indexing of records of any type is an inexact science and depends heavily on several factors, including the quality of the record copies, the quality of the handwriting of the person making the record, and the ability of the indexer to distinguish between different handwriting styles during the indexing process.

Taking a Step Back

When I came to the realization that the accuracy of the data I was looking at was problematic, I took a step back and decided to assess the situation. The first thing I did was to rethink which surnames should be included in the analysis, and I came up with the following categories:

1. Names that generally can sound alike, such as Ackley, Hackley, Hagley (see the discussion in the previous blog post).

2. Names that could be "variations" of one another; i.e., over time various branches might have adopted different pronunciations/spellings, such as Ackley, Ackerley, Atcherly, Akeley. (Side note: I have a good example of this in one of the non-Ackley branches in my tree. One of my 2nd great grandmothers had the maiden name "Jeannerette"; there is a branch of that family (confirmed by DNA matches) that goes by "Jinright".)

3. Names that have the same historical meaning, such as Ackley and Oakley (see the discussion in the previous blog post).

4. Names that look alike when written out and can be mistaken for one another during indexing, such as Ackley, Ockley, Ashley, Achley, Arkley, Oakley.

There could of course be some overlap between the categories; some of the names in category 4 could sound alike, depending on how one pronounces the beginning vowel. For example, Ackley and Ockley could sound similar -- I have a German friend who pronounces my name more like Ockley. Same goes for Ockley and Oakley -- if you pronounce the O in Ockley more like a "long" O, the two names sound identical. The exact categorization isn't as important as the inclusion of all of the names in a list to be investigated.

Category number 4 proves to be the most problematic because it requires the most manual work and use of judgement to reassign records to the various surnames to improve the accuracy of the frequencies that will be used to create the distribution maps. Below are some examples of records that were indexed as Ackley but upon closer inspection appear to be one of the other surnames mentioned in 4 above.