Record of the Parish List of Deaths, 1785-1819 [of Salem, Massachusetts]

This celebrated volume is a thorough examination of some 5,000 descendants of John Goode, son of Richard Goode of Cornwall, who emigrated first to Barbados and ultimately settled at Whitby, about four miles from Richmond, Virginia, at some point before 1661. Commencing with a chapter on the English origins of the Goodes from 1148, the author, G. Brown Goode, meticulously lays out the story of the Virginia Goodes and their allied families for eight generations in America to 1887. In the process, we see the dispersion of this family from the Richmond environs to Lunenberg, Chesterfield, Prince Edward, and still other counties in Virginia, through much of the ante-bellum South, and ultimately to places to the north and much further west. It is the enormous scale and detail of the family history itself, however, that impresses the researcher most and has caused the work to remain in continued use to this day.