Clarissa Adaline Goff(e)



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:
 

While less than certain about his father's date and place of birth (our records show 1820 and Carlisle, but it's good to have an alternative lead to pursue), Clark seems very definite about everything else, and we should be able to find the Goff family in Pittsfield (with less definitie information, this quest has been driving my brother crazy!), not to mention a Clark family in either Chambersburg or Carlisle, working its way up to 14 kids through the 1810, 20, and 30 census.