Nathaniel Greene Golden
Nathaniel Greene Golden was born in South Carolina about 1812, and both his parents were South Carolinians. He carried the name of the Revolutionary general, which half the back country did.
He married Arzela and they were in Pickens County, South Carolina through the 1850s. By 1860 the family had crossed into Tennessee to the copper mining town of Ducktown in Polk County, and by 1870 to the ninth district of McMinn County, outside Athens, where the census gives his occupation as doctor and a personal estate of two hundred dollars.
In 1880 he is in a different state from his wife. Arzela is in Fannin County, Georgia, head of her own household, five children under her roof, and the column says married. He is at Cheoah Township in Graham County, North Carolina, sixty eight, a labourer now, with a wife Jane of thirty three and three more children: John eleven, Sarah five, and Amanda, one, born in North Carolina.
The Georgia-born ages of Jane's older two put that second household back into the 1860s, which is while the first one was still being enumerated in Tennessee.
The 1870 enumerator wrote him down as Samuel. The 1880 census has him as N. G. Golden, and the son born about 1861 is Nathaniel Green. Two against one, and the name a household gives its own child is the tiebreaker.
The South Carolina records differ by one letter. In Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina every clerk wrote GOLDEN. In South Carolina they wrote GOULDING, and that is how the 1850 census has him: *Nathaniel G. Goulding, 37, farmer*, dwelling 405, family 425, Township 5 of Pickens District, with a hundred and fifty dollars of real estate, his wife and four small children. The 1840 census of the same township has him twice, once as N. G. Golden and once as Nathaniel G. Gouldin.
And the woman in the next dwelling may be kin. Family 426 is RACHEL GOULDING, seventy four, with a nine year old Isabella R. Goulding in the house. A Rachel Golden headed a household in the same township in 1840. Same surname, same township, the door next to his, and old enough to have borne him. Nothing says she is his mother.
His second wife has a name. She was ELIZABETH JANE SOSEBEE, born 17 July 1848, out of a Fannin County family. In 1900 she is a widow of fifty in Stecoah Township, Graham County, head of her own house, with six children born and four living. She died on 4 September 1930 and lies in Guge Cemetery in Graham County, still a Golden after fifty years. Her widowhood is what dates him: he was alive in 1880 and gone before June 1900.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Nathaniel Greene Golden (b. 1812)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nathaniel-greene-golden-1812-ce38d5.