In these pages there is quite a lot of information on the families of Stephen Goff and Helen Ellis, who started out their lives a long way from Iowa, and from each other. Eventually, they both - separately - ended up in Cherokee, Iowa, but even though they obviously met each other and were both at the time single, you would say that these two were not meant for each other, as he was old enough to be her father, with several children by his late wife, and she was a young teenager. You can start out in this section by reading their separate biographies (see links near bottom of this page), or anywhere you want that the links below might lead to.

The links below go to the basic pages in this section -- You can get from those pages to other pages going into more detail. Below the links below there are some statements on the Goff family.

LINKS

Joanna Perkins & Joseph P. Rankins

Robert W. Ellis & Eleanor R. Rankins

Melinda Crandall Goff - Biography

Helen (Ellis) Goff - Biography

Stephen Goff - Biography

Cherokee, Iowa Pictures

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Click below to see which of our families lived in which counties in Iowa.
CLICK HERE FOR COUNTIES AND FAMILIES
....CLICK AGAIN, on map, to see in readable size.
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We have quite a lot more on the Goff family than is in these pages: in Michigan, in New York, in New Hampshire, and in Massachusetts (actually, going back to 1649 in England). We also have more on Helen's ancestors. In this little history of our Iowa ancestors, though, we are sticking to the subject as much as possible.

Tens of thousands of people in the U.S. are descended from our earliest Goff (spelled Goffe then) ancestor in the U.S. so this family has been well researched, and in fact some of our own research on our end of our lines has been used by others. Almost all of the Goff/Goffe information and pictures (though only black and white and grainy due to being photocopied) that we have (or were loaned and have been given back) are in the Goffe book that we printed out for interested family members (who contributed many of the pictures and much of the information) in the late 1990s. Since that time we have accumulated more bits of information on our family in just about all of its lines that have come through Iowa.

-- Helen Stone and Barbara O'Reagan, 2009.

...OUR IOWA FAMILY
...Preface
...Introduction
...Table of Contents
...Links to All Maps
...Questions & Answers