More false American lineages connected to English nobility?

Question

In line with a recent question that has been revived about false medieval ancestries, I seem to have discovered another 3 all connected to the Cooper or Ashley-Cooper family.  

1) Penelope Cooper or Ashley-Cooper (sometimes with a sister Lucretia) is supposedly the daugher of Anthony Ashley Cooper, eventually 1st Earl of Shaftesbury by either his third wife, Margaret Spencer, or an illegitimate daughter by someone called Massie.  She may also have married Peter Massie in Virginia? (There is another 5 profiles for Penelope, at least another 1 for Lucretia)

However she is sometimes referred to as the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury's granddaughter.

There is discussion about her here and here

2) & 3) Lady Jane Cooper, supposedly the sister of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who married a cousin, John Ashley, and also emigrated to the American colonies.  John Ashley, was the son of William Ashley, or William Harrell Ashley, the maternal uncle of Anthony Ashley Cooper.

However none of the records I have checked mention Jane Cooper, and Anthony Ashley Cooper's mother Anne Ashley, was the only surviving child of her parents, so William Ashley must also be either invented or connected to this family mistakenly.

Sources I've checked - Wikipedia articles for Anthony Ashley Cooper and his father Sir John Cooper.

Cokayne's Complete Baronetage, Vol 1, p 198-199

Collins's Peerage of England, vol 3, p. 546 & 582

Cokayne's Complete Peerage, 2nd ed. vol 11, p. 645-646

The Houses of Parliament website - profiles for Anthony Ashley and John Cooper

A life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury by WD Christie, particularly Vol 1 - Chapter 2 & 3

In essence there appears to be no evidence for the existence of Penelope (and/or Lucretia) Cooper, Lady Jane Cooper or William Ashley either under those names, or as connections to the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, unless anyone has other evidence (I don't have access to any of Richardson's books for instance)

 

 

Comments

The text above is fair but I would have included Ashley-Cooper / Shaftesbury in the question.

Should we not merge the Penelopes before detaching them?

Penelope is Ashley-Cooper 5 and.1, Ashley Cooper 3 and Cooper 6774

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She is also Cooper-6811 and Ashley_Cooper-2 and 3.

I think we probably need to decide what LNAB to use before merging.

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I would go with Ashley-Cooper

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Given there is no proof she is related to that family, it would seem to be at cross purposes to give her the LNAB Ashley-Cooper?

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I am with Jack Day (below) on this.

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Ashley-Cooper's published papers make it clear that he had several daughters as do at least two of his biographies. It is also documented that he had at least one illegitimate son, born during his first marriage.   It is entirely possible that he had a daughter Penelope since Ashley-Cooper's third wife Margaret Spence's mother was named Penelope (Wriothesley) and that Penelope has a sister named Lucretia who married a Cecil.

My understanding of the Massie and Johnson family legends differs from that presented by Gershom Perdue, as follows: Penelope, one of Ashley-Cooper's daughters, became pregnant out-of-wedlock and was dispatched to the American colonies. There she married Peter Massie (who may have been her illicit lover) and bore twin daughters, Lucretia and Sarah Massie

Think we should keep Penelope and make notes her bio about the "sources" and "legends" until we find further evidence one way or the other.

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Thanks Vicki, I did see the website all that information comes from, but as it failed to cite any sources I feel that it is not to be trusted.  It's very easy to state that his papers and several biographies agree with the writer but those works aren't cited.

Although there might be valid information out there, nothing I have found so far agrees with anything on the website.  In fact every source I've listed above states that he didn't have any children with his third wife Margaret Spencer, and in any case if Penelope was born about 1647, then it is before that marriage took place.

He did have a stillborn daughter with his first wife, and she also had several miscarriages, but the only record of other children is his 2 sons with his second wife, Frances Cecil.

I think I would prefer to go with Jack's option, of keeping one of the profiles but disconnecting it from any parents.

Answer 1

I would recommend that at least Penelope be retained and written up with a description of why she never existed.  I did this with Mary Catherine Blyzzard -- http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Blyzzard-1 -- and offer that as an illustration of what I mean.  She's marked with {{questionable}} which gives a nice warning logo that she may never existed and the narrative explains the reasons why.  

This is intended to accomplish two things:  First, if anyone tries to upload a Gedcom containing Mary Catherine Blyzzard they'll be warned that WikiTree already has such a person;  this will keep them from recreating this fictional character.  Second, if they read the narrative, they'll know WHY not to recreate this fictional character, and be provided with links to the real people whose facts were distorted to create the Mary Catherine character.

Since Mary Catherine never actually existed, she cannot have parents, spouses or children -- therefore no such links in the data field, but any appropriate cross-links to real people with explanation in the narrative itself.

Comments

Really? The page  Blyzzard-1 does not exist.

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Ah, the joys of technology, James.  I had put the url within parentheses and our computers then thought the ) was part of the url.  I just took the parentheses out and now the link should work.

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Thanks Jack, she would have had to be retained anyway, as profiles generally aren't deleted, but I take your point about making it clear why she isn't related to this family.

The question remains, as to what to use as her Last Name at Birth (LNAB)?  Although it's not entirely clear when the family starting using Ashley-Cooper as a surname, rather than Ashley as a middle name, it does seem that in this time period, they were still using Cooper as their surname.  All the sources I referred to above use Cooper as the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury's surname, and it might be another 2 or 3 generations before the double-barrelled Ashley-Cooper emerges.

So I think if Penelope is to be retained that Cooper should be her LNAB

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When we're dealing with real people who actually lived, the WikiTree philosophy is to try to respect the surname/LNAB that the person or their family would have actually used.  

But once you agree that the person never existed and the main purpose of the profile is to keep others from making the same mistake, I would think that philosophy shifts. Now, wouldn't the best LNAB would be the one likely to keep the greatest number of people from making the same mistake?  Because people who didn't exist aren't part of families, they're part of legends!

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Jack - I love how you handled imaginary Mary.  perfect.

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That’s a good point, Jack. We often have to do that, otherwise we are constantly facing the same problem.

Answer 2

This all comes from the Johnson and Johnston family books, circa 1900.  According to which, there's a letter written by an old Quaker.  Which as usual nobody has actually seen.  It's a pretty obvious forgery made up by the writer of one or other of the books.

But these things acquire life of their own and evolve.  According to the letter, Shaftesbury had 2 daughters Penelope and Lucretia, who married 2 Massies, and their unnamed daughters married a Johnson and a Johnston.

In the modern version, there's only one Massie and one Shaftesbury-daughter, who had 2 daughters, Lucretia and Sarah.  Supposedly there's a PR with the baptisms, but nobody cites these verbatim and dates vary.

Somebody who listed Massie's other kids didn't find those two.  He did find a Penelope, who's supposed to have married Johnston.  But Johnson is said to have married an Elizabeth.  Looks like Lucretia and Sarah also need to be reshelved in the Fiction section.

Massie's real wife, the mother of his real kids, is evidently Unknown Unknown, since there's nothing on her first name even.

On the net, Earls' daughters usually get promoted to Countesses, but here they don't even get the Lady they're entitled to.  Perhaps it would seem incongruous that the highest-ranking person in the hemisphere wouldn't have her name mentioned in any records anywhere.

Comments

Thanks RJ, the process from forgery to acceptance, seems awfully familiar. To make up for Penelope and Lucretia not getting their title, their supposed aunt, who is also probably fictitious, seems to be always referred to as Lady Jane Cooper, when as the daughter of a Baronet she would have no claim to the honourary title of Lady.

Answer 3

Thanks for pointing this out, as I always had this connection on my tree, and since so many others also did, I never really questioned it until now. However, what is interesting, is there's a blog about a whole romantic story about how Lady Jane Cooper was the 1st cousin of John and William Ashley, and that the two brothers were both in love with her, and that they decided whoever she picked, the other would move to the colonies, so John won her hear, and William went to the colonies, and then John and Jane then followed, and went to the colonies. See [http://skyvington.blogspot.com/2009/02/lord-and-his-lady.html] There are also two rivers, called Cooper River and Ashley river, after the 1st earl of Shaftesbury. See [p. 325 of, "The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Volume 1"] Also, I should point out, that the lack of evidence of Lady Jane ever being mentioned in any of the above sources as another daughter, doesn't necessarily mean she didn't exist as their daughter, as a negative doesn't prove lack of connection. And the sources consulted appear to be sources were baronetcy books, and females wouldn't necessarily be as relevant in those, since they wouldn't inherit the baronetcy, and Wikipedia is just people putting things in, and there are mistakes all the time, as I often comment on talk pages when I see such errors, which is more frequent than I would like. Additionally, the birth year we have for Jane is 1627, and if Anne Ashley died in 1628 of small pox, then she would have only been a baby. The children were sent to live with other guardians, namely a Sir Daniel Norton, and then their maternal uncle, Sir Edward Tooker. So possibly the daughter got shuffled to a different household, and so history has not recognized her as much, or maybe was forgotten. I can only speculate. Also, my family line, shows that Jane Cooper's granddaughter, another Ann Ashley, b. 1701, married a Sir James Forrest, whose son William, married into the Gresham family, who we have showing as being great nobility as well, and includes the Lennards as ancestors, who once were the estate keepers of one of the largest manor houses in England, Knole Park. Also, several generations up one of the lines, we have an Elizabeth Monck on the Gresham family. Interestingly, the Earl of Shaftesbury was very politically involved with the Monck's, and supported Sir George Monck's motivations to restore the Rump Parliament (what was remaining of the legitimate parliament from before Cromwell dissolved the parliament after dethroning Charles II). Anyways, very interesting, and clearly there are weaknesses in the connection here, so I think it is worth investigating, as I would like to know where my family line truly goes.

Comments

Sorry Lisa, I think we all understand having to come to terms with information about our families we have always believed to be true, suddenly being questioned.

I made a very exhaustive search at the time and feel quite confident in saying that if Jane Cooper and her husband John Ashley existed, then there is no evidence at all that they were connected to the Ashley-Cooper families of the Earls of Shaftsbury.

Even though you are correct that different children may have ended up in different households, it is inconceivable that one would have been forgotten and not mentioned in any records of the time, particularly one who lived to adulthood.

It's entirely up to you of course, but I would be going right back and making sure I had definite proof of relationships, and questioning all those stories of links to noble ancestors.  There seem to be many American immigrants who are connected back to a noble English family with the same or similar surname, that have proved to be incorrect.

Good luck and there are many people on WikiTree who are only too willing to help you.

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I think I know the origin of the Lady Jane Cooper and John Cooper Ashley  story, Lisa. See if this helps:

It started with the children of John Wesley Ashley and Amanda Pruitt. John and Amanda were born and married in the Abbeville, S.C. area. They had five children born in Texas: one daughter and four sons. I don't know who the daughter married. One son died early adult, two sons moved to Southern Calif. and the oldest is my grandfather, James Henry Ashley. James and my Grandmother Sarah Dunagan  moved to Oklahoma, had several kids, then moved to Oregon (total 15 kids). My Dad is David Jefferson Ashley b. 1906 O.K. These siblings remained close and by the time their kids became adults (like me) stories became told as facts. Then a grandson of my oldest Aunt decided to write a book about our genealogy based on these family stories and not facts.  I discovered he did not even bother to take five minutes to check census data to back up family stories before starting an extensive family tree and widespread message postings that included the whole Lady Jane myth. This established credibility as he was the most vocal, which drew in all our extended cousins and snowballed from there. Updated his tree Jul 2011 posting:  '...recent DNA  testing helped establish a genetic tie to proper bloodlines.... known Isaac Ashley desc. have tested positive as a match to John and Lady Jane...'etc.  That is again misleading. While there are many ties thru DNA to other Ashley bloodlines, there are four kits in our line which match. One kit has no pedigree, two kits Issac abt. 1669 Kent, MD, one kit George Washington Ashley 1831 S.C. (s/o Moses 1801). Moses is s/o Isaac who is brother to our direct line. That ties our line to Isaac Ashley born abt. 1669 Kent, Maryland with no documentation or DNA for John Cooper Ashley, Jane Cooper, England, or any other Ashley's in America (except the kit with no tree, LOL!).  Lisa, did you first hear the story from Shaun or his internet postings?   For several years he had many of us looking for the parents of Amanda Pruitt when they were four houses down from her and John in Texas. He said she had a twin sister named Miranda who married a mulatto. Nope! I checked that out, too with simple census records. Just another little family story. BTW Amanda's mother was not Martha Anderson. She was Martha Gambrell, and Amanda's husband had a sister named Melinda who married an Anderson.  See how Family stories get confused? It is not that people are not telling the truth. They are simply not verifying. As to stating something is verified when it's not? Ummm...mistake?

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Lisa, I have seen your reference to the two rivers in South Carolina on postings from others. Are you using such to establish credibility for the Ashley brothers story of falling in love with their cousin Jane Cooper?

Anthony Ashley Cooper is credited for founding the Carolinas in America and the Whig Party in England. He is not an Ashley Paternal line anywhere. His wife Anne Ashley's peerage ends with her Dad because he had no male heirs and therefor only continues as Cooper Paternal Surname.

No documents or DNA connect our American Ashley's to any British Titles or Peerage. Genealogy is a fun fact-finding hobby.