Colonel Brooke Payne once said: "An extended exploration through the silent and forgotten past wherein lie buried the records of our ancestors reveals very luminously our kinship with the world of strangers among whom we now live - the homogeneity of our race. This is the truth that lies at the bottom of the ancestral well. Such a search is made in the spirit of reverence for all those countless buried millions who contributed towards making us what we are will inevitably develop in us a sense of our kinship with all mankind, a sense of wholesome and becoming humility and a broad tolerance." That is the objective. We must take what we find, in humility and tolerance. The farther back along the road we travel the more we discover that we are all related in some way and that there really is no individual story but only threads pulled from the fabric of the same great tapestry. The story of my emergence is therefore the story of our emergence; my history is our history and in America and in the south in particular all roads lead to Virginia.
I don't think John Gaulding, my direct ancestor who eventually settled in New Kent, Virginia and his wife Anne had easy lives. Of the eight children that are listed with them in the Vestry Book of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church of New Kent, Virginia I'm fairly sure five of them died young. That makes three sons who migrated from New Kent to Prince Edward County, Virginia in search of a better life. None of the daughters survived, including Martha who died in 1721 at the age of ten and for whom her father had to petition the church for money to buy the "winding sheet" she was buried in.
Their mother Anne died in 1735 and John probably preceded her but his death is not recorded. The parish records at St. Peter's has suffered considerable damage over the years and large segments of the original documents have been destroyed. John and Anne's son Samuel was apprenticed out to Thomas Edwards of Goochland to learn the trade of Carpentry. He was my direct ancestor. He was listed as an orphan at the time.
I have been researching my Gaulding family line since 1986 and in about the year 2000 became interested in trying to find the origins of this man who came from England and was recorded in the Vestry Book of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in New Kent, Virginia in the early 1700’s. I began collecting what information I could find, but there wasn’t much of it that pertained directly to my ancestor John because New Kent County, Virginia is one of the ‘burned counties’ of Virginia, meaning most of the colonial records in that county have been destroyed by one means or another over the years. There is mention of him in a book called Men of Matadequin: Three Hundred Years from New Kent County (Virginia) by June B. Evans. The book was published by Bryn Ffyliaid Publications in 1984 and the few remaining copies are on sale through various booksellers and eBay. Men of Matadequin has long been a sourcebook for the related family lines of Banks, Blackwell, Burnett, Durvin, GAULDING, Goodman, Lipscomb, McGhee, Parsley, Slaughter, Weisiger, Wood, Zall and others as well as the genealogies of several of the early colonists and their families who resided in Hanover and Kent County, Virginia. The book itself is very scarce, but I was able to find it in the Clayton Library for Genealogy Research, located in Houston, Texas and also in the DAR Library in Washington, DC. In it John Gaulding is only identified as ‘having probably come from England.”
A few years ago I gathered together the ponderous volume of random notes I had gathered about the number of men named Goulding, Goldinge and Golding who were early immigrants to America. Some of them migrated to New England and some directly to Virginia and the Bermudas and put up a website called GAULDING ORIGINS where I research and post information and try to come to some conclusions about who they were and how they might, or in most cases, might not be related to my ancestor John. For the most part I have come to a lot of conclusions as to who John Gaulding was not. I knew the background of most of the early immigrants to New England and Virginia in the 17th century and John of New Kent didn’t fit any of their profiles.
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He was not related to the Golding Family of Essex or Suffolk, nor was he related to a man named John Golding who lived in Essex, Virginia and was married to Elizabeth Ripley. I have included both of those family lines on my website, for information purposes only. Their stories are interesting, even though they have no genetic connection to my family. The Essex Golding Family continued through the descendants of Arthur Golding through Bermuda and eventually ended up in New York.
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He was not related to Thomas Goulding who was at Jamestown beginning in 1623 but again, there are no records to indicate where he might have come from. I have my suspicions based on other records, but can’t prove his absolute identity.
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He was also not related to another man named William “The Clergyman” Goulding, whom I suspect was part of the Golding of Suffolk family whose life reads like a Swashbuckling tale. There are others, with equally interesting stories.
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He was not related to the Goulding Family of New England, whose family line began with Captain Peter Goulding of Sudbury, Massachusetts. That man I believe was the original immigrant and my conclusion is that he was connected to the Golding family of Essex or Suffolk. I do not believe there was any such person as Rev. Thomas Goulding who supposedly came to America during the Great Migration years and helped establish the town of Dorchester. There is no evidence that he ever existed.
So, who was John Gaulding of New Kent? There were family clusters of similar surname in residence all over England at the time John Gaulding was born, so through an exhaustive analysis of a lot of information, my current conclusion is that he was born in about 1665 in Warwickshire, probably near Kineton or Tysoe and went to Virginia as part of the wave of migration that left the Midlands between 1680-1695. He completed his indenture by the mid-1690's, married and by about 1705 he and his wife Anne appear in the St. Peter's Parish Register. Although his name does not appear in Plantation records of the early 18th century, I have reason to believe he lived his life as a tenant farmer on Elham Plantation, the home of Colonel William Bassett. His sons grew up in that difficult environment and after the death of their mother (unconfirmed) they traveled first to Amelia County, Virginia and then settled in Prince Edward County, Virginia where they stayed for a while. The sons were John "Matthew", Samuel and William.
The Gaulding family was Anglican and not Quaker, and their children were baptized according to the rites of the Church of England. Anne died in New Kent County.
The documents on this website that directly relate to his life and the basis for my conclusions are located in the section entitled THE OXFORDSHIRE/WARWICKSHIRE LINE of John “of New Kent” Gaulding on Gaulding Origins.
III.5. THE OXFORDSHIRE/WARWICKSHIRE LINE of John "of New Kent" Gaulding
John Galding and Anne Stuart of New Kent County
Looking for the missing pieces in New Kent
Descendants of John "of New Kent" Gaulding
Christ Church Virginia Records
New Kent Line: John "of New Kent" Gaulding
Quaker links for Gaulding in Campbell County, Virginia
Thank you Laura Jane Gaulden Bailey
Zachariah Brumfield Gaulden and Palmer Goulding
Quaker Records in Chester, Pennsylvania
Gaulden records in Chester County, Pennsylvania
The possible ancestry of John “of New Kent”
Sibford Gower and Banbury/Alderbury
My DNA Link to the West Midlands
Catherine Gauldin, 2026
Gaulding Origins
https://www.gauldingorigins.com/