History of Mansfield, Texas, 1996, p. 249)

Isaac Goodnight was born in Harlan's Station near Harrodsburg, Kentucky, January 1, 1782. His father was Hans Michael Goodnight, who emigrated to America from Germany. He was a Baptist and a refugee from religious persecution in his native land.

Isaac was bound to William Hays at the age of sixteen to learn the trade of a saddler at Standford in Lincoln County, Kentucky. At the age of twenty-one, he became a professor of religion under the preaching of Reverand William Finley.

The Curry and Goodnight families moved from Kentucky to Texas in covered wagons about the middle of the nineteenth century. Tom Goodnight was the son of Isaac Shelby Goodnight and Permelia Jane Curry, buried in Rehoboth Cemetery located north of Mansfield. Isaac Shelby Goodnight was the son of the illustrious "Isaac" Goodnight"

Much information on this family's early generations was found in an article from The New York World, "Three Lives in Four Centuries," published about 1907. The article does contain errors:

New York World

It is not often that the span of three lives stretches into four centuries, but Mrs. Martha Lawrence, who recently died in Warren County, Ky., was the granddaughter of a man who was born in 1694. Moreover, her father was the first white child born in Kentucky.

Michael Goodnight (probably Gutnacht in the original German), born in Germany in 1694, emigrated to Virginia in 1708. He married early and one of his sons was present with George Washington and Daniel Boone at Braddock's defeat. He removed subsequently to North Carolina, where he became many years later an ardent supporter of the Revolution, in which several of his sons fought. His first wife dying, he remarried in his old age. When he was past 80, he penetrated to the Kentucky wilderness on an exploring expedition with 30 men under the celebrated borderer James Harrod. He returned to North Carolina for his family, intending to bring them to Harrodsburg, which others of the party had chosen as the site for the first settlement in Kentucky.

But when they were within a day's journey of the fort they were attacked by Indians at midnight of Sept. 1, 1775. Michael and most of the party were killed, but some escaped in the darkness. Among them were Mrs. Goodnight, whom men from the fort found two days later lying unconscious in the woods.

Four months later a son, the first white native of Kentucky, was born to Mrs. Goodnight at Harrodsburg, and was named Isaac. He was of great vigor and courage, and while yet a boy he became one of the most famous Indian fighters in Kentucky.

(A curious tradition that has been passed down through the family says that throughout his entire life, Isaac could never go to sleep without a cover over his face.)

(On September 5, 1805, he married Elizabeth McMurray of Mercer County, Kentucky, and three years later moved to Warren County and settled at Three Forks. He began buying land in 1815. Ten children were born to this marriage.)

(Elizabeth died in 1827 and Isaac married second, Mary Ground. They had five children. See Report on Robert Groundfor information on the Ground family.)

(Isaac's third wife, Rhoda Gadberry, was 8 years older than her husband. She died in 1860, after twelve years of marriage.)

(Isaac believed it was not good for a man to live alone, so he took a fourth wife, Frances Dickerson, 39 years his junior. She survived him for many years.)

He lived to be 93 years old, surviving the civil war four years (although an elder brother had fought in the French and Indian war more than a century earlier), was married five times and became the father of 21 children. His last surviving child, Mrs. Lawrence, who has just died was 78 years old, and left several great-grandchildren.

The fifth (??) wife of Isaac Goodnight, the man who was born the year the cannon were thundering at Bunker Hill, has only been dead a few years. One descendant of his recently represented the Third Congressional District of Kentucky in the lower house of congress, and many others are of prominence in their native state.

It is a singular fact that the grandfather of an American woman who has just died was born when Mary and Dutch William were on the throne of England, when Louis XIV reigned in France and the Battle of Bienhelm was not yet fought.