John Goff, Salem Preservationist

In today's Salem Gazette, John Goff writes about "Some old Salem ties to Nantucket" and references the Thomas Gardner Society's website. In the article, John alludes to the peaceful nature attained on Nantucket as opposed to the more cantankerous mode (my usage) in parts of New England.

Earlier, John wrote about King Philip and about the turmoils related to his time. John and his co-author ask what-ifs about more peaceful approaches, albeit that the die seemed to have be cast earlier. Many left the old country to get away from violence (Laud's love of nose splitting and ear cutting off, as an example). Too, it was in the King Phillip's war that the Gardner family lost a son, Joseph, however Thomas and Margaret were already passed on.

Aside: Governor Simon Bradstreet married Joseph's widow, Ann, who had Gov. Simon sign a pre-nup that she drew up. The house is remembered by his name, though.

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John Goff is one of the many modern descendants of Thomas. He will be the first in a series that we will start on descendants. We first ran across John's work (Salem preservation and newspaper columnist) on an early web search for Gardner which turned up the article on Gardner/White (the post was from 2011).

John's ancestor is Richard who was the third son (Dr. Frank's book) of Thomas and Margaret. Then, John's lineage continues with Richard's son, John, who married Mary Starbucks and, then, Elizabeth who married Stephen Gorham.

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One planned activity will be to go through John's articles at the Gazette and create an index as part of our bibliography. For instance, this little bit on the Pioneer Village was a great read. It got me to look at Nathaniel's (a Thomas descendant) book, Grandfather's Chair (courtesy, archive.org). The Pioneer Village has a replica of the Great House (Cape Ann) that was taken over to Salem on orders of John Endicott (Winthrop dined there).

Also, John has written of the Salem historians: Joseph B. Felt, Harlan Horton Smith (worked on the Pioneer Village), and more.

This is the Google search result for "John Goff " at the Gazette site. The theme, for the most part, is Salem and early New England. Hence, these articles are of interest to the TGS.

Remarks:

08/27/2022 -- Updated link to John's article. Probably need to check the other links, as well. Finally, added John to the Descendants of Richard. Just for the record, search results on John Goff  (23 posts) in this blog. 

01/07/2019 (updated, 02/08/2019) -- The Thomas Gardner Society, Inc. would like to thank John Goff for his support over the years. We have pulled together a list of his contributions (Gems of Salem).

11/24/2014 -- John featured at anceSTORY archives: Tidal Mills defined by John Goff.

01/25/2013 -- We need to design a framework for doing descendant bios.

Modified: 08/27/2022