This homepage outlines the Henry Roosevelt Golden family of Jefferson County, Alabama, and the Alvah Edison Norfleet family of Chesapeake, Virginia. Other families of immediate interest are the Belcher (southeast U.S.) and Styron families (mid-Atlantic region).
While the records within this webpage are largely indexes I maintain a separate website at http://www.gworx.com/goldnorf/. More substantive items will appear on the alternate website.
For Goldens everywhere, please consider this also to be your homepage -- or at least a research way station. I have indexed many Goldens regardless of their actual relationship.
My own research shows that there are at least four major groups of origin among American Goldens: Irish, English, Jewish, and Eastern European. There are also at least 20 different variations of the Golden name -- from Goldwyn to Golding to MacGoldrick -- and many of them are indeed related by blood and birth.
I am specially indebted to the work of Rollin Golden. Rollin has done a great deal of work on the Golden family from which I descend. A majority of the research done on our mutually related Golden branches prior to Green Golden (mid 1850-1870s) and the modern day descendents and many allied branches, was done by Rollin Golden and published within a book available directly from Rollin. Rollin can be contacted at goldroll@jps.net
There is also owed gratitude to the many people who send emails and freely share their information. I normally get 15-25 emails per month and at least 2-3 are from related Goldens.
My Goldens got off the boat from Ireland at Savannah, Georgia, just prior to the Revolutionary War. Some migrated up through the Carolinas, Virginia (and West Virginia), Kentucky and then down through Tennessee into Alabama. My own generation includes Goldens in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia plus undoubtedly another 10-15 states.
Family lore, which also is echoed and documented by Rollin Golden, has it that my branch of Goldens were not Irish so much as temporary residents of Ireland. They could have been English, or they could even have been Jewish refugees from Portugal and Spain several centuries earlier prior to their travels in the English and Irish isles. No Jews are known to be in the family today but lore has it that some Goldens were. My grandfather, Henry Roosevelt Golden, used to tell me about how there were 'Jews in the woodpile' but he didn't know about any specific relationships.
Note: Whether my grandfather's story is true or not there has been a growing body of research on 'Secret Jews'. These Jews had centuries earlier embraced Christianity in Portugal and Spain beginning around 1492. Conversion was essential to survive. After becoming Christians many also continued to secretly practice limited forms of Judaism. Many of these Spanish and Portuguese Jews were themselves descendents of similar events in England (1290) and France (1394). These new converts to Christianity mixed so well that 90 percent of modern day Spaniards are estimated to have at least one Jewish ancestor from this time period. Whether this is also the story of my own Goldens I really do not know. But it is the story perhaps of your Goldens, probably originally named D'or or Dior.
One Golden of particular interest to me is Green Golden, circa 1840-1880 (AL, FL, GA, KY, TN, VA, WV). There were several Greens, some related and some possibly related. That is the grandfather at which I got lost. Family legend has it that he came from Southeast Kentucky and went down to Rome, Georgia, where he married an Indian woman. He and his bride then moved to Northeast Alabama and had a brood of children. Green later left the family and returned to Kentucky where he remarried and had more children. Green supposedly often visited his Alabama and Georgia kinfolk. In his later years he supposedly lived in the southeast Kentucky or w
|
