are you familiar with the name Gustav Anjou if you aren't you should be he
is a famous genealogical conman in today's episode
of the ancestral findings podcast I'll give you his story and how he did it
gustaf Anjou is an infamous person in genealogical circles if you haven't heard of him yet chances
are you will at some point as you go over old genealogical records in your research he is
one of the most well known genealogical fraudsters in the world a self-described
professional genealogist he made up hundreds if not thousands of patently false pedigrees
for those who wanted an impressive family tree to show off to colleagues in the community one
of his specialties and what he did the most was creating illustrious family backgrounds for his
clients full of historically prestigious and brag worthy names usually for clients who were
looking for some upward mobility though most of his fraudulent work has been discovered
and discredited some of it is still out there deceiving honest researchers who want to find
the truth about their family background knowing about mooss Stephane Jew is something important
for the modern genealogist because you'll want to be able to recognize something that might be his
work get it double-checked and steer clear of it if it proves to be false as all of Anjou's work
will Anjou was born in Stockholm Sweden to parents Carl Gustav Jung Berg and Maria Luisa Hagberg it
is unclear if his parents were married or not his mother was the housekeeper of his father at
one point they may never have gotten married and it is likely they didn't Gustav made a name for
himself in forgery early on in Sweden and served a prison term for it there in 1886 after getting
out of prison he changed his name to Gustav Ludvig Youngberg but also used a series of other aliases
one of the most common aliases he used was Gustav Anjou Anjou was the maiden name of his fiancee
Anna Maria Anjou and it is also a historically prestigious name as the founder of the English
Plantagenet line of royalty was Geoffrey of Anjou after marrying in eighteen eighty-nine Gustav and
Anna moved to the United States arriving in 1890 they lived on Staten Island in New York and Gustav
became a naturalized American citizen in 1918 he and Anna had only one child and both she and
the child preceded him he is buried at fair few cemetery in West New Brighton Casselton corners
New York City New York Gustav began his career in genealogical forgery almost as soon as his
feet touched American shores he began presenting himself to others as a professional genealogist
adopting a high-class look and way of talking that inspired others to trust him because he
lived in New York City he had access to some of the wealthiest families in the country these are
the people he sought out as clients and he was employed by many of these well-to-do East Coast
families to trace their pedigrees he always backed up his supposed findings with a lot of
research which made his work seem legitimate the clients usually only wanted to see that
research was done they likely didn't read it to learn if it was truthful or even matched up with
the pedigree he was presenting them because his work was so thoroughly documented through fake
documents and took a significant amount of time to do presumably because he was actually doing
genealogical work for his clients he was able to charge high prices for the early 20th century and
became a well-off person because of the fraud it wasn't until the early 1990s that anyone began
to question and Jews work and when they did it became clear that he created these pedigrees
with the intent to defraud his customers there were scholarly examinations and investigations
into an Jews work by respected genealogists in the field and these investigations and their
results were published in reputable genealogical journals the researchers discovered a unique but
recognizable pattern to an Jews genealogies they were usually represented by four clear
features present in verse every pedigree he put together for his clients these features
include the following a lot of citations often quite significantly more than a regular pedigree
would produce and those citations largely matched up with documents that actually existed and even
contain the information and you said they did this was to ensure his clients didn't question
his work if they delved too deeply into it a handful of made-up documents usually with no
citations these documents supported information listed in the pedigree with so many real citations
to wade through most clients wouldn't notice a fake one here and there and they didn't a large
number of connections to early New England immigrants usually with royal connections in
Europe or ties to the Mayflower or other famous events places or people the connections were so
complex and dizzying as to be far out of the range of the normal New England pedigree which
usually contains a few interconnections between family branches wild migration patterns for the
people in the pedigree way outside of the usual migration paths of early American families and
Jews works are now considered unreliable in respected genealogical circles and are widely
looked down upon for good reason virtually nothing the man gave to his clients was real he was only
telling them things they wanted to hear and then coming up with both real and fake documentation to
back it up it was a brilliant scam in his day because there was almost no way for anyone to
verify whether his work was real or not without retracing it themselves and because his clients
were hiring him to produce pedigrees for them why would they want to go back and do the work again
themselves that's what hiring a genealogist is for right the trust his clients placed in him his
Wyatt took so long for the fraud that was his work to come to light in the modern era of the Internet
anyone could easily double check most of his work without much effort or even leaving home in most
cases this kind of fraud would be difficult to perpetuate on an unsuspecting genealogical market
today but in Gustav Anju's era it was just the right time for this sort of thing to go unnoticed
some genealogical issues are more prevalent in modern times than they were in the past in the
next episode of the ancestral findings podcast I'll give you some ways you can get past these
issues in your research to learn more about genealogy and sign up for our weekly giveaway
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