The Goodridge traces their roots to some of the earliest English settlers in America. They trace back to William Goodridge who was born in England and had children born in Massachusetts Bay in 1639. We will pick up the Goodridge story with Benjamin Franklin Goodridge’s parents, Oliver and Elizabeth, parents of five children.
Elizabeth was born April 14, 1752 in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and died at of the young age of 46 from breast cancer on November 25, 1798. Her ephitaph reads:
Here rests a woman, good without pretense,
Blest with plain reason and with sober sense;
So unaffected, so composed a mind,
So firm, yet soft, so strong, yet so refined.
Heaven as its purest Gold by tirtures tried.
The