A name we carry together.

Our family's records go back fifteen generations, to a Samuell Yeadon born in 1538 in the Yorkshire village that shares his name. Between then and now there are 601 relatives on record. Some carry Good. Most don't, and every one of them is family.

The Good name started as Gut, in Ottenbach, a village outside Zürich, in the 1600s. By the 1700s it had crossed to Pennsylvania and become Good. Other branches came from England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Many of them met in the farm country of Virginia and Tennessee before the family spread west to Indiana, Colorado, and California.

Service runs all the way through it. A Swiss-born blacksmith named Johann Jaeger changed his name to John Hunter and, by family account, fought in the Revolution under Captain Abraham Lincoln, the president's grandfather. Joseph Preston Yadon came over from Ireland as a drummer in the British Army, then changed sides and fought for independence. George Wisecarver, another Revolutionary veteran, is remembered in the family as George Washington's wagon master.

In the summer of 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified, a boy born in Back Creek, Virginia was named George Washington Good. He's buried in Indiana, in a cemetery that carries our name. Relatives served again in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. That's the inheritance we're working to be worthy of — and why Good Heroes is personal.

Every generation inherits tools more powerful than the last. So the question we care about goes beyond what the tools can do. We want to know what they do to people, and whether people stay the authors of their own lives.

A foundation lets a family answer that question with patience. We can study before we speak, back work that takes years, and say no to anything that trades long-term good for short-term attention.