Clarissa Adaline Goff(e)

• FATHER:  Jerry Goff (fl. 1822)        MOTHER:  _____ Mead (fl. 1822)
• BORN, 1822, probably New York
• MARRIED Alexander Clark (1820-1903)
Date, Place
• CHILDREN
Ida
Charles Theodore (1845-1911)
• DIED,

NOTES:

Not much information on her. Jean Varnum has her wedding dress, which she assumes was passed to Charles Clark when his older sister Ida was killed. Charles T. Clark's Bar Association eulogy (without giving her name) refers to her as a New England schoolteacher (from Massachusetts) of "gentle qualities," but the comments on her character could well be pure invention to go along with the ethnic slur involved in saying Clark's character was so "mild and equable" that he could not have inherited it from the Irish side (a clear invention, since, as we have seen, his father's obituary reveals much the same character). In any case, a New England schoolteacher marrying an Ohio agri-businessman suggests a parallel pattern (and similarly unexplained) to the Eliza Skinner-Silas Smith marriage on the other side of the family some thirty years later.

Nelson Haldane passed along a valuable excerpt from a letter from Charles T. Clark to his daughter, Margaret Clark Castle (Nelson's grandmother), dated Feb. 12, 1911.  She was trying to discover if she was eligible for the DAR, and this is what he said on that subject:
 

"I have no family Bibles and never had one of my mother's family.  She was the daughter of Jerry Goff and a Miss Mead.  Jerry Goff was born at Pittsfield Mass. Where the Goff family had lived for several generations but Jerry found his wife "Miss Mead" in (New) York State where they lived after the marriage and where my mother was born and reared at or near Rochester.  I think Jerry Goff's father was a soldier in the revolutionary war.  Uncle Steele (?) and mother both said so.  My father was born at Chambersburg Pa about the year 1825, 50 years too late for the war, his parents having come to this country from County Tyrone, Ireland in the year 1800 and all but three of their fourteen children were born at Carlisle or Chambersburg Pa."

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