Gough One-Name Study

(Click on picture to enlarge) Martin Gough

Gough
One-Name Study

Topics

About the Gough One-Name Study
Variants
Origin of the surname
Frequency of the name
Distribution of the name
Contact Details

About the Gough One-Name Study

The GOUGH One-name Study was started in 2005 by me, Martin Gough, as my interest in my own lineage developed into a broader study of the GOUGH surname. The purpose of the study is to collect and share as much genealogical information as possible on the GOUGH surname. If you have any enquiries about the Study, any genealogical questions or any family information you would like to share, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Variants

The registered variants of the name are GOUGH, GOFF and GOFFE, though many more spellings of the name have been found in historical records.

Interesting enough statistical analysis of the distribution of the occurrences of the variants would suggest that they are not actually variants at all and that GOUGH and GOFF (along with its less frequent cousin GOFFE) have completely different origins.

Origin of the surname

The GOUGH surname probably derives from the nickname for a red-haired person, from Welsh coch ‘red’, or as a reduced form of the Irish McGough which itself is an Anglicized form of Gaelic Mag Eochadha, a patronymic from the personal name Eochaidh, variant Eachaidh, ‘horseman’, a derivative of each ‘horse’.

Goff, on the other hand is English (of Cornish and Breton origin) and is an occupational name from Cornish and Breton goff ‘smith’ (cognate with Gaelic gobha). The surname is common in East Anglia, where it is of Breton origin, introduced by followers of William the Conqueror.

Frequency of the name

The index of 1881 British Census has only 219 Goffe entries, only slightly less than the 240 listed in the 1880 US Census Index. The British Index lists some 8000+ Gough surnames with about one quarter of that number of Goff entries. This situation is reversed in the US with approximately 8500 Goff entries and 2800 Gough’s.

According to an ONS database there were some 16,905 Goughs, 3493 Goffs and only 320 Goffes in the UK as of September 2002.

Distribution of the name

As part of the GOUGH One-Name Study I have extracted and counted occurrences of the GOUGH surname on a county by county base for each of the five English and Welsh Census executions between 1861 and 1901. I then calculated each counties total as a percentage of the entire GOUGH population as well as of the total number of entries for that county irrespective of surname. These figures where then plotted onto a series of graphs such that it was possible to view the population distribution at the time of each of the five census executions and to draw conclusions on how the population distribution of the GOUGH surname had changed over that period.

Contact details

For further information, contact:

Mr Martin D Gough
22 Gloucester Avenue,
Broadstairs,
Kent
CT10 2HP
UNITED KINGDOM
E-mail:

This page last updated 25 February 2008.