Goddard

Member of a London guild known as the Worshipful Company of Grocers, William — the first of the family to arrive in the American colonies — was a man of apparently considerable property. He had in fact sailed from London expressly in hopes of foreclosing on a mortgage. Meanwhile, in London, the plague returned and the Great Fire broke out. William sent for his family and stayed in Massachusetts, settling in Watertown, where he was made a freemason in 1677, farmed, and became a teacher of Latin. A great-great-grandson was one of the first watchmakers in the English colonies. Goddard Space Flight Center is named for his sometime even greater great-grandson Robert H. Goddard, who died 10 August 1945. A Goddard married a Rice, married a Brooks, married a Martine, married a Court.

Source: Cutter, Genealogical and Personal Memoir, vol. 4, p. 2665; Pickering, Nathaniel Goddard: A Boston Merchant, p. 4.