This "oops!" goes out to all of the family trees out there (and there are many of them) that include the false information from the Wheeler book on the Ogden family (Wheeler William Ogden Lawrence Van Alstyne and Charles Burr Ogden. 1907. The Ogden Family in America Elizabethtown Branch and Their English Ancestry; John Ogden the Pilgrim and His Descendants 1640-1906. Philadelphia: Printed for private circulation by J.B. Lippincott Company.) It's available on the Internet Archive here.
Quite a bit of information in the book is accurate. The "Oops!" is the part that traces the line back to England. For that William Wheeler relied on an genealogist named Gustave Anjou. Mr. Anjou is now recognized as a genealogical con man. You can read about good old Gustave on Wikipedia here.
I have to admit that early in my research I found this book and fell for the con. Luckily I discovered the truth and was able to prune my family tree of the false pedigrees. That is one of my many, known "Oops!" moments. I sure hope that my tree does not have very many yet unknown ones.
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