I apologize up front if you are reading this post hoping to find some new revelations about the true parentage of Nicholas Ackley. So far, I have found nothing new about Nicholas's parentage, but I have discovered additional information discrediting what many have accepted as his ancestry.
Quite some time ago, I wrote a post about The (Supposed) Ancestors of Nicholas Ackley. In that post, I attempted to debunk the notion that Nicholas Ackley's father was John Hackley, from Hopton Castle, and that his ancestors reached back to Hughe de Hackluite in the 14th century. This pedigree, or some variation of it, appears in many, many online trees on Ancestry as well as WikiTree, and seems to have its origins in a pedigree that was published in the book The Life of Charles Henry Hackley, Drawn from Old Public and Family Records by Louis P. Haight [1]. Virtually all of the Ancestry trees cite other Ancestry trees as the only source for their information (which is like having no source at all), while WikiTree makes repeated references to what seems to be the Haight book in the profile for John Hackley, who is listed as Nicholas's father. This note in his WikiTree profile describes the Hackluite information:
"Descendants of Hughe De Hackluite. Mr. Haight had Gustave Anjoy, a Hasbrouck Heights, NJ, professional genealogist, trace the Hackley "family tree" back to Hughe De Hackluite in Herefordshire, England in 1377."
The name Gustave Anjoy (who it turns out is actually Gustave Anjou) is new information to me; I discovered it recently while assisting a fellow Ackley researcher who is writing a new book on Nicholas Ackley (which I will discuss in more detail in a future post). The two of us began independently looking into Gustave Anjou and learned that he is a notorious forger of genealogies who was cranking out pedigrees by the hundreds in the early part of the 20th century. Anjou originally pedaled his genealogies to well-to-do clients for the hefty price of $9,000 (which is equivalent to almost $300,000 today), but eventually began selling them for $250 through a mail-order business. Mr. Anjou's business even made page 1 of the New York Times in December 1927 [2]:
The article goes on to sing the praises of the work Anjou was doing to make genealogy affordable to the masses, with no hint of the fraud he was perpetrating that was finally fully exposed in the 1990s.
The first hint of Anjou's fraud came in an article by George McCracken in American Genealogist in 1976. McCracken's article was really just a short note in which he advocated starting "a list of genealogical authors whose works are so untrustworthy that they deserve general condemnation."[3] Without explanation as to why, the list included Gustave Anjou, Charles H. Browning, C. A. Hoppin, Orra E. Monnette, Horatio Gates Somerby, Frederick A. Virkus, and John S. Wurts. (Many of these authors plus a few others are mentioned in the article found at the "Link of the Day" below.) However, it wasn't until two companion articles were published in 1991 in Genealogical Journal that the full extent of the fakery was exposed. Gordon Remington wrote in detail about Anjou's carefully fabricated life story and the persona he invented to make himself attractive to his clients [5], while Robert Anderson used an example of Anjou's work to reveal the methods he used to produce the hundreds of bogus genealogies he sold to unwitting customers [4].
In his article, Anderson also published a list of 109 Anjou genealogies believed to be fraudulent along with their call numbers at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Other researchers have added to the list, and there are now over 300 genealogies produced by Anjou that are considered to be fakes; among them is the Hackley genealogy. For a complete list, see the forum entry by Nicole Wingate on genealogy.com [7].
In describing Anjou's methodology, Anderson wrote [4]:
A typical Anjou pedigree displays four recognizable features:
1. A dazzling range of connections between dozens of immigrants to New England; for example, connections far beyond what may be seen in pedigrees produced by anyone else.
2. Many wild geographical leaps, outside the normal range of migration patterns.
3. An overwhelming number of citations to documents that actually exist, and actually include what Anjou says they include and
4. Here and there an invented document, without citation, which appears to support the many connections noted under item 1 above
Without rehashing the points made in the original post, it is pretty clear that the Hackley pedigree presented in the Haight book fits the pattern laid out by Anderson. The pedigree includes references to Nicholas Ackley and is the apparent source of Nicholas's ancestry mentioned above; we now know it is not to be trusted. Much of the information about earlier generations is documented and verifiable, but there are too many leaps of faith required to connect the generations to each other. Likewise, bits of the data on Nicholas are correct, but most of it is just flat out wrong, and supporting sources are not provided.
It is hard to know which parts of the pedigree can be attributed to Anjou; in the opening paragraph of the chapter on Hackley's ancestry, Haight credits only H. Farnham Burke with the research on the pedigree. Sir Henry Farnham Burke (1859-1930) was a professional genealogist and held several royal appointments to positions related to English heraldry and genealogy. In 1826 his family established "Burke's Peerage", a guide to royal and other prominent families worldwide, and it is still published today. However, there are several clues that Haight engaged Anjou for help with the pedigree, and there was a long association between the two. There is a signed letter from Anjou at the front of the book, dated April 16th, 1906 (the book wasn't published until 1948), verifying the Hackley coat of arms that appears in the book. Additionally, in The First Two Hundred Years in Muskegon [6], author Frederic Read details Haight's efforts to honor his friend Charles Hackley and states that:
"To top if off, Mr. Haight had Gustave Anjoy [an apparent misspelling of Anjou], a Hasbrouck Heights, NJ, professional genealogist, trace the Hackley "family tree" back to Hughe De Hackluite in Herefordshire, England in 1377, and from then forward to the life of Charles Henry Hackley in Muskegon. According to Dr. Anjou's information, one ancestor, Sir Thomas Ackley, was mayor of London in 1511. Another was sheriff of Eaton in England, another a rector of Westminster."
Read's book was written in 1976, so Anjou's work had not yet been exposed as fraudulent. Whether Haight gave Anjou credit or not, it is apparent that the "research" on the pedigree in Haight's book was Anjou's work.
While I feel that the dismantling of the pedigree presented in the earlier post,
which I wrote without knowing that Anjou was a fraudster, was pretty thorough and stands on its own, this additional information about the fraudulent nature of Anjou's work should be a red flag to anyone researching Nicholas Ackley. It is all the more reason to discount Nicholas's ancestry, which was based on that work, that has made its way to every corner of the genealogy internet. If you have included the Hackley information in your tree, I would strongly suggest either removing it or at the very least including comments/warnings for anyone who sees your tree that the information is definitely not reliable.
Sources
1. Haight, Louis P., The Life of Charles Henry Hackley (Muskegon, Michigan: Dana Publishing Company, 1948), p. 107-120.
2. "Sells Family Trees at a Cut-Rate Price." The New York Times, 12 Dec 1927, p. 1.
3. McCracken, George E. (July 1976). "Towards an Index Expurgatorius". The American Genealogist. 52 (3): 182.
4. Anderson, Robert Charles (1991). "We Wuz Robbed, The Modus Operandi of Gustave Anjou". Genealogical Journal. Utah Genealogical Association. 19 (1 & 2): 47–70.
5.Remington, Gordon L. (1991). "Gustave We Hardly Knew Ye: A Portrait of Herr Anjou as a Jungberg". Genealogical Journal. Utah Genealogical Association. 19 (1 & 2): 59-70.
6. Read, Frederic. The First Two Hundred Years in Muskegon (Publisher and location unknown, 1976), p. 89.
7. Wingate, Nicole. "Fraudelent Lineages" on genealogy.com at Home > Forum > General > General Genealogy
Link of the Day
Like most genealogists, I have relied more than once on prepared genealogies to fill in earlier generations of my tree. After learning about Anjou and other fraudsters, I plan on consulting this link to make sure I haven't unknowingly used bad information.
Quote of the Day
"No legacy is so rich as honesty."
-- William Shakespeare
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