OUR FAMILY CHRONICLES : 1779-1979

The Story of the Pioneer Goodman, Blocher and Routh Families

By: Josephine Goodman Routh, 1st Edition 1979, revised 1989
Edited and expanded 1993-2023 by Ronald E. Goodman

The events and dates portrayed in this story are true. If any of the characters, living or dead, resemble a person or persons you have known or loved. It is purely intentional. Only the small details have been added in an effort to make the story interesting.

Selections from Our Family Chronicle:

These are selections from the non-copyrighted works of my aunt, Josephine Goodman Routh, including her own preface, the results of her research on the Goodman and Routh ancestors, and supplemental information and postscripts. In addition to factual information from many family documents, it also 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.

Much of the memoirs from the mid-1800s to date are from an original text written by Josephine Goodman Routh and dedicated to all of her grandchildren, so that they may know something of the lives and loves of their ancestors. That text was electronically scanned and converted to computerized text by Darrel Wayne Goodman and edited and revised in 1994 through 1998 by Ronald Eugene Goodman. Ronald and Darrel are both sons of Josephine’s elder brother Clifford Goodman, and grandsons of Roy E. Goodman and Florence V. Blocher. From Ronald’s research, it now includes new information about our family’s ancestors prior to 1800, corrections and additional information gathered from various genealogy books, US census records, correspondence with other Goodman and Blocher family researchers, and computer databases and websites that are now becoming available. Also minor editing of the Josephine Routh text for syntax and structure.

Additional and Recent Materials:

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 and on FamilySearch.org. 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, some parts of these stories are to be taken as conjecture, and not hard fact.

Records and original government and church sources for almost all of the now deceased people mentioned herein have also been collected and uploaded to FamilySearch.org, a genealogy website and world tree database developed and maintained by the LDS Church and many thousands of genealogists and volunteers. This effort was not only be myself, but also by many other members and descendants of these families. Wherever possible, links to those person’s records on FamilySearch.org are included in the appropriate pages of this website. To that end, the family tree charts originally contained in Josephine’s book, have been replaced with links to the applicable FamilySearch records, where the family tree charts can be seen as they have been further corrected and detailed on that website.

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, State and Church and other records from around the world, has also greatly assisted in documenting our family’s history and ancestors. However, much of my research, especially in the 1993-2009 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, at the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and at the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

This is not the end of this family’s saga, as long as the Goodman, and related descendants, live and love, and have their adventures in life. Hopefully, they and their children will continue to add to this story. If they will do that, this will become a living history for all who come after us on this earth and beyond.

Table Of Contents

• VIRGINIA COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR GOODMANS
• TENNESSEE AND KENTUCKY PIONEER GOODMANS
• KANSAS PIONEER GOODMAN AND FENTON FAMILIES
• BLOCHER FAMILY
• FALWELL FAMILY
• NOAH BLOCHER AND MARY FALWELL
• ROY GOODMAN AND FLORENCE BLOCHER
• MY GREAT GRANDFATHER AS A FRIEND
• ROUTH FAMILY CHARTS
• THE RUNAWAYS
• ED AND RHODA
• THE SWINDLER AND RAINS FAMILIES
• LUTHER AND LESSIE RUTH
• RAY ROUTH AND JOSEPHINE GOODMAN