Category: Charles Henry Browning Fraud
Categories: Frauds and Fabrications
Charles Henry Browning (1846-1926) was a Pennsylvania genealogist and publisher who specialised in tracing royal descents for the Gilded Age magnates of the American East Coast. He was a member of the Aryan Order and "made his living off the fashion for royal lineage among Americans who publicized their actual or imagined descent from royal or noble blood [...], relying on the notion of heredity to legitimize their claims to social superiority..." (Source: The Aryan Order of America and the College of Arms of Canada 1880-1937, by Yves Drolet; Montreal, Canada, 2015, p. 25.[1])
Browning found a partner in crime in the Founder of the Aryan Order of America, a fellow author of false lineages, the self-styled Viscount de Fronsac, Frederick Gilman Forsyth alias Frédéric Gregory Forsyth de Fronsac.
In 1883, he published a volume entitled Americans of Royal Descent, which was to be revised and republished in later editions. Another of his fraudulent publications was the "famously inaccurate" Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1912).
Browning also contributed to the propagation of other people's fabrications, such as a bogus lineage for Henry Adams (1583-1641), who immigrated from co. Somerset, England to Braintree, Massachusetts. Henry Adams' great-grandfather was a lowly tenant farmer, but in 1853 a forged document fooled the editors of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, and the bogus lineage was republished in 1893 in Browning's Americans of Royal Descent. The NEHGR has diligently tried to warn its readers about this false lineage: see (for example) the Register's 1902 book notice of the Rev. Hiram Fairbanks' "The Ancestry of Henry Adams."
This category is a location to identify the profiles of people whose biographies and family histories have been affected (or in some cases may have been affected) by Browning's fabrications. "Affected" is the operative word -- listing in this category does NOT mean that the profile itself is fraudulent; hopefully it is listed because the fabrication has been identified and corrected.
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