OUR FAMILY CHRONICLE 1779-1979
The Story of the Pioneer Goodman, Blocher and Routh Families
By: Josephine Goodman Routh, revised
1989
Edited and expanded 1993-2005 by Ronald E. Goodman
Selections from Our Family Chronicle:
These are selections from the non-copyrighted works of my aunt, Josephine Goodman, including her own preface, the results of her research on the Goodman and Routh ancestors, and supplemental information and postscripts. It contains many of the verbal traditions and stories of this family, as told by the participants to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren over many generations. This work was my primary source of inspiration for my subsequent genealogical research. It has been scanned and converted from the original pages, and only slightly edited where appropriate.
Additional Material:
In addition to Josephine's work, I have added new chapters in the Goodman section on our earlier Goodman Ancestors of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, and many related families. These chapters are mostly factual, based on documented details from my own research as posted elsewhere on this web site. They are also part narrative fiction, where I have merged known facts with possible and likely events in these early ancestor's lives, and combined them in a background based on historical records and books about the early colonial and pioneer period. For this reason, these stories are to be taken as conjecture, and not hard fact.
Soon to come are more formal presentations of the Goodman and other family trees, produced from my own Family Tree Maker database that has been collected and refined over the past 12 years. The FTM database also contains many Goodmans thought to be related to our family in various ways. These charts, along with a new expanded edition of "Our Family Chronicle" will be available to the families of Roy and Florence Goodman at the June 2005 Family Reunion in Stockton, MO.
I also owe a great deal of gratitude to the many Goodman and related family researchers on the Internet for their generous contributions and comments over the years. The Internet itself, and the online availability of images of US Census and other records, has also greatly assisted in documenting our family's history. However, much of my research, especially in the 1993-2000 period, was primarily gleaned from many hundreds of hours of digging through books and microfilms in libraries, at the National Archives in Denver and Philadelphia, at many county courthouses in Virginia, and at the Library of Virginia and Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.
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