Family name origins & meanings
- Irish : reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Guagáin (see McGuigan).
- Born in 1612 in England or Ireland of an Irish father, the soldier and magistrate Daniel Gookin spent time in VA on his father’s plantation as a teenager. In 1644 he moved to MA to escape the persecutions of Governor Berkeley. He was a stalwart defender of the rights of the Indians and wrote two books on the subject, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, written in 1674 and The Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians, completed in 1677. Gookin also wrote a History of New England, the manuscript of which was unfortunately destroyed without being published. He died in 1687.