I always love a lit­tle sleuthing and all the bet­ter if it argues against some poor­ly researched report that made its way to Wikipedia.

Short sto­ry: a short item in a nineteenth-century ency­clo­pe­dia claimed that Shak­er founder Ann Lee had Quak­er par­ents. The Wikipedia entry says: “Her par­ents were mem­bers of a dis­tinct branch of the Soci­ety of Friends (a sect of Quak­ers) and too poor to afford their chil­dren even the rudi­ments of edu­ca­tion.” The cita­tion is an 1879 ency­clo­pe­dia arti­cle. The link to it is to Wik­isource, which has put all of the entries up as text ver­sions. There it reads: “Her par­ents were mem­bers of a dis­tinct branch of the soci­ety of Friends, and too poor to afford their chil­dren even the rudi­ments of edu­ca­tion.”

That is the Tim Gee com­piles five pieces of evi­dence that together

Ann Lee Was Nev­er a Quak­er: Here’s the Evidence 

Five rea­sons why Wikipedia is wrong.

Friends Journal