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:
"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."
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.