The Goughs and Jones are from North Wales and the Harveys are from the Potteries so how did they meet; read on!
The Gough family were miners for most of the records I can find. They started in the Denbighshire coalfield, not a large field but apparently has been mined since Medieval times and the coal was shipped to other places or used locally for iron smelting. Another very important mineral mined close to Wrexham was lead, mined by the late 1200's if not before. The family was able, with this background, to find work in other coalfields as they did in the Staffordshire field where the coal aided the development of the Potteries and then further afield in Lancashire and Yorkshire ending up in the Castleford area of Yorkshire. The origin of the name Gough and its variants are discussed below.
The paternal great-grandparents of Florence Mary Gough families are from the Potteries with the names of Harvey & Bunting. The importance of the Potteries and the raw materials that led to its development and so the attraction to families looking for work can be found in Wikipedia. The article shows the Potteries as an area needing labour that well predated the movement of the Goughs from North Wales.
The Harveys are a family from the Potteries, the oldest being Jesse Harvey born at Shelton, a suburb now of Stoke-on-Trent. Jesse & his wife Elizabeth Bailey had daughter Ann and Mary; both of which have DNA matches to the family. Ann married Joseph Bunting.
The Bunting families seem to have originated in Derbyshire with Joseph Bunting, 1810-1857, from Belper who was a Silk lawn weaver. He married Ann, in 1836 in Hanley, also now a suburb of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire and they had 6 children.
So the families joined in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent when David Gough, born near Wrexham, and moved to Burslem with his parents as a miner, married Ann Bunting, daughter of Joseph Bunting and Ann Harvey. The family moved around from the Potteries to Yorkshire and back to Wrexham while the family rose to 10 children. David then lived at Coedporth and became a 'Fruiterer & Confectioner'.
David Gough had 10 children and the lives of several of them have not been traced so far. His eighth child was Osborne Leonard Gough. Like his father and, in fact most of the male family members, he was a miner; often on the census as a 'coal hewer' which more accurately describes an underground role. He married Sarah Elizabeth Jones in 1906 and they had 4 children before he was called up and sent to the trenches in WW1. By 1917 he was a Sergeant in the Kings Own Royal Yorkshire Light Infantry as part of a force at Bullecourt. This comprised both British and Australian troops and is known for the poor decisions of the British General commanding (another Gough, not related) and the terrible loss of life in trying to break the German lines. Osborne was killed during the second Battle of Bullecourt on 3 May 1917. An Australian assessment of the battles is on the Australian War Memorial web site HERE. (Opens in a new tag).
Another interesting point about the death of Osborne is that his memorial at Arras Cemetery had his name completely transposed to Leonard Gough Osborne; not discovered until his great-grandchild Hilary Mead was researching her family and brought it to attention! However all the Army records for him at the time are otherwise correct.
Now to the Jones'. The Jones family seem to have originated in the valley of the River Clwyd which flows from south to north into the sea at Rhyl on the north coast of Wales, in the town of Ruthin. The first Jones we are fairly sure of was a slater and plasterer. His second son, Thomas Jones moved away from Ruthin to Wrexham, married Jane Williams and moved again to Manchester where he worked in the railway works as a Boiler Maker while the other Jones stayed in Wales.
updated July 2026.