Laura (Jordan) Goff was born three years after President Lincoln was assassinated. This great grandmother lived until my freshman year of college, December of 1962.
So Many Uprootings Laura, who inherited her mother’s deepset eyes, small nose, and kindly expression, taught in a Guthrie County one-room schoolhouse. When she married Sherd Goff in early 1890, she could no longer teach, so she traded her teacher watch to her father for a cow. Sherd Goff was anxious to pioneer. Laura promised she’d move with him anywhere, as long as it was within the United States and there were schools to educate their youngsters. Laura bore eleven babies in twenty-one years, in a family way nearly every time they moved, mostly in Guthrie County, Iowa, but also to Audubon County, Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota. Ten children lived to adulthood. During the 1920s Sherd bought Laura’s dream home, a furnished Victorian on the bluffs of the county seat. A U-shaped staircase led from its elegant downstairs to the second floor bedrooms. Stained glass windows brought a glow to the dark staircase. Laura, a member of the WCTU, learned how to vote at her church in Guthrie Center, likely the first in my motherline to vote in 1920. But there they buried a daughter and a daughter-in-law. Meadowlark Songs