Peter Jamieson's personal website

Welcome to this Goodworth family history web site.

I created this site to help gather all the information on Goodworth family history that I was coming across.  Things have slowed down considerably over the past couple of years, not least because of my involvement in a children's book project (see the Tommy Two Tones (the friendly ambulance) site - and that's my only commercial plug here).

On the buttons at the top of this page, you can see place names such as "Barnsley", "Leeds", "West Clayton" and so on. These are the origins of various branches of the Goodworths in England. If your surname is Goodworth, your family almost certainly originates in one of these areas (Let me know if it doesn't).

Information on site history and current effort can now be found on the Site History page. I don't record all changes separately. The latest minor change is...

A Goodworth "Message Board" has also been created on the Ancestry.com/Rootsweb site at the following address: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec?htx=board&r=rw&p=surnames.goodworth

But hold on a minute...which Goodworth family? Well, as far as I can tell, it may be possible to trace every Goodworth in the world today back to a small number of families originating in the Hatfield area on the Yorkshire/Lincolnshire border in England, and perhaps a separate family based in the London area. There are other possible early connections with similar names such as Godwarthe etc. If someone out there has already managed to put all this genealogical information together I'd be very interested to hear about it. Where are all these Goodworths today? Well, there seem to be

• a hundred or so people in the UK phone directory and/or registered as voters
• quite a lot in Australia, descended from at least 3 different Goodworth ancestors in England
• quite a lot in the U.S.A. There seem to be two main groups - some who emigrated from Lincolnshire to Utah, and other groups based mainly in PA - at least some of these came from Leeds, but I haven't been able to make all the connections yet.
• Originally it looked as if there were very few others. Some immigrants to the USA from Austria, Poland etc. in New York and elsewhere seem to have adopted Goodworth as an anglicised version of their original name (there are quite a few variants such as Godeth from those areas), and the 1920 census suggests that there were more such people than I previously realised.

So who am I? My name is Peter Jamieson, and I've been chasing up all the main branches of my family tree. So I'm obviously not a Goodworth. But my paternal grandmother was Elisabeth Goodworth from Winterton in Lincolnshire. Her family came from Hatfield/Thorne in Yorkshire. She met and married my grandfather John Kay Jamieson (who was from the Shetland Isles to the north of the Scottish mainland) in Leeds, Yorkshire. After a few years in Dublin, Ireland, World War II and a couple of years in rural Yorkshire my father moved back to Leeds, which is where I'm from. I now live in Manchester in England.

What are my 2009 plans for this site? Well, less ambitious than when I started several years ago, that's for sure. The site has probably already served its purpose in acting as a magnet for Goodworths, Goodworth descendants, and others interested in this line. If you are "new," you can still contact me or use the web-based discussion board on Ancestry.com by following this link. In some ways the Internet has become a slightly scarier place than when I first started, I think it has also become clear that most people with family photos etc. would rather not post them on a website managed by someone else, if at all. But if you do want to do that, please let me know. I would just love to have more photos (even modern ones of related places) here. That said, very few (if any) of the original buildings where these families might have lived still survive, certainly in England and I assume elsewhere as well.

A couple of years ago I set out to provide a more organised way of locating info. in the collection, particularly now that the links between most of the groups (Hatfield, Sheffield, Whitgift etc) have been reaosnably well established. I looked at using the TNG package to do that, and may re-visit that option. 

In 2007, I started looking at the Hatfield Court Rolls, most of which are in the archives in Leeds. I found a few interesting Goodworth-related snippets in the first couple of sessions I had (mainly to do with people being appointed the official ale-taster for the year, that kind of thing. But it seems that those particular records would not be likely to record info. about people moving in and out of the parish, which is mainly what I was looking for.

I've now had contact with quite a few Australian and U.S. Goodworth descendants/relatives, and one UK Goodworth relative, but if you are a Goodworth or interested in the Goodworths, please e-mail me here.

Peter Jamieson