To start, there's a lot of confusion over how to spell her name. I'm using the one inscribed on her headstone, located in Lebanon Baptist Church Cemetery in Blue Ridge, Fannin, Georgia, USA. The headstone is a lovely dark and light marbled obelisk, shown on her FindAGrave memorial. (Due to copyright, I won't provide the image directly.) The Social Security record for her daughter spells it as Gulley. The death certificate for one of her sons reads Gullie. Family trees and census records show Gooley, Goolie, Gooly, Goolby and even Gooney.
I tried to research where the given name may come from, but was unable to find any information about its use as a given name. Most of the information I found concerned Gouley as a surname rather than a given name. The SurnameDB entry for Gouley provides a bit of context as a surname being Gaelic or Norse. But both Wisdom Library and House of Names indicate it may derive from French. I can't help but wonder if it may have been a nod to some ancestral area I've yet to find. On my maternal line, I've been unable to break out of the United States. Beyond my regions on Ancestry and other DNA sites, I have no information at all from where my maternal family hailed (but my current DNA estimates don’t identify a French region).
Gouley was the daughter of my maternal 3rd great-grandparents David Oaks (b 1797 North Carolina) and Polly Lovell (b 1799 South Carolina). She is my 2nd great-grandaunt. She was born 14 Jan 1833 in Georgia. On 08 Jun 1852, at the age of 19, she married 23-year-old Jackson Patterson in Gilmer County, Georgia. Gilmer is the county right next to Fannin, where Gouley appears to have spent most of her life. As were many of the men in my family, Jackson was a farmer. And Gouley, like most women of the time, kept house.
I must admit, I've not completed my research on this couple. Several family trees show them with 13–14 children. Jackson Patterson died in 1890, but Gouley lived on until 24 Mar 1915. The 1910 Census shows her living with her son Robert Patterson (also a farmer) in Mobile, Fannin, Georgia. The census records her as having had 11 children, with 9 still living. A quick audit of the available census records shows her recorded children as:
- George (b 1856)
- James (b 1858)
- William (b 1860)
- Caroline (b 1863)
- Enoch (b 1864)
- Adeline (b 1866)
- Samuel (b 1869)
- Martha (b 1871)
- Robert (b 1874)
- Ellen (b 1876)
- Jackson (b 1878)
It certainly seems the 1910 census was on the mark with 11 children, but I'll admit, the 4-year gap between marriage and the first recorded child does give me pause. I can't help but wonder if there may have been 1 or 2 children who died in infancy. But, with how precious little I know about Gouley, it's unlikely I'll ever know the answer. I may find 2 of the 11 who passed away before 1910. Or, perhaps, I'll be left with another mystery. The additional names shown in some user trees are unverified as far as I can tell, coming only from other user trees (so I will discount them for now).
I started this post as a fun, tongue-in-cheek Halloween-themed post. Now, I'm left with more questions than answers. Where did the name Gouley come from? How was it really spelled? Maybe no one actually knew? Just how many children did she have? Was it really 11, or 13 as some user trees postulate? And, if the census count is accurate, precisely who were the 2 children who died before 1910? While I only learned a tiny bit about Gouley as I wrote this post, I did end up with one new resource tool for my Genealogy Toolbox. Surname DB has been added to the Names section.
Do you have any great Halloween names in your tree? If so, have you researched how they came about? I'd love to hear your stories!
Disclosure: I used ChatGPT to assist with a title and search description, and to review this post for clarity, punctuation and grammar. Unless otherwise indicated, the content and all opinions are my own.
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