First-Person+Inquiry+Application-AG

Family history has always been important to many members of my family. Growing up I remember my Father and Grandmother telling me countless stories of our family past. Many years ago a member of my family, George Tuttle Goforth, wrote a 776 page book that tells the history of my family name, members with my surname that date back to 1565 and family relations that date back to 1215. This is where I received the majority of my research. This text has been researched, published and distributed among family members and the academic community. This text can be found in the library of congress. The author of this text passed before adding in the next generation. My family has their own copy of this text and my Father has been updating the text as more family members are born to keep our family history alive. To my knowledge this text has the most accurate information available about my family history. The text states that there are three merited reports of the origin of the name. The text says “One report says that the Goforth name originated several hundred years ago when a man was faced with the alternative either to violate conscience or to go-forth and leave everything rather than to do what he thought was not right. They called him Goforth, and that was the way the name started. “ (Goforth, 1988) The next origin the book speaks of is that the surname is based off the fisherman lifestyle. “Another report is about a man who used to fish for Gar and always went to the forth or bay, and the name Garforth was started, later being changed to Goforth.” (Goforth, 1988) The last theory was taken from some previous research. “An article was taken from the newspaper __Long Beach Independent-Telegram,__ on Sunday, April 30, 1967, stated that the last name Goforth is an English locational surname and was formed from the old Welsh word, ‘Gof’, coupled with the English ‘ford’. Together these terms describe ‘Blacksmith’s centuries of usage by descendants of the first ‘Blacksmith who lives at the ford.’” (Goforth, 1988)

I did some additional online research of my surname and found very little information. The name Goforth is not very popular and there has been little additional research done on our history. The majority of the results were linking the name Goforth to other surnames. One site I found did have information on the history of our family name. Most of the information on this site overlapped with the information I found in our family genealogy text. The site did provide one additional theory of the origin of my surname that I had never heard of. The site stated that the name Goforth could have derived from the French term “giffard” meaning “chubby-cheeked”. This is the first time I heard of an origin that did not describe an occupation or an attitude but a physical description of the family. I found this origin interesting because the most common physical characteristic in my family is round cheeks.

I also did research on my given name to discover the meanings attached to my name. Unlike many members of my family my name is not a “family” name. No one in my family has ever been named Alexandra so I was interested to find the origins. Most of the sites stated that the name is a feminized version of Alexander, which means “man’s defender”. The name has roots in many cultures but it originated from Greek mythology.

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