George Oliver Goodhue was born on January 2, 1847, in Danville, Quebec. He was the son of Joseph Lord Goodhue, who owned the J.L. Goodhue & Sons tannery. He published articles on bee-keeping in the 1880s. In the 1890s he started a petition to raise funds to purchase a new mastiff for Helen Keller, and contacted Helen Keller's teacher about funding her education.
He died on June 25, 1901, in Danville, Quebec.
William Goodhugh, his father’s namesake, was born in St. Marylebone, London, the son of a publisher, bookseller, biblical scholar, and the author of The English Gentleman’s Library Manual, or, a Guide to the Formation of a Library of Select Literature. Young Goodhugh left Britain in 1850 and ended up in Victoria, Australia, where in 1854 he married his first wife, Eliza Proudfoot Garie, a Scot from Perth. They had four children but his younger son had died by the time the family moved to Montreal in the early 1860s. Both of his daughters soon died in Montreal, where according to the 1871 Canadian census, he described himself as a merchant. His wife died shortly afterward, but in 1878, he married Mary Steele Powell. They had two daughters. Goodhugh’s older son, William Garie, already a young man, had become a clerk (according to the 1881 Canadian census) and married in 1886. The older Goodhugh’s second marriage was almost as ill-fated as the first: his older daughter died in 1904, followed by both William Garie and his second wife in 1908.
