Probably Elizabeth. Perhaps Mary.

From;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Goose

"In spite of repeated facts,4 there are doubtful reports, familiar to tourists to Boston, Massachusetts that the original Mother Goose was a Bostonian wife of an Isaac Goose, either named Elizabeth Foster Goose (1665-1758) or Mary Goose (d. 1690, age 42) who is interred at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.5 According to Eleanor Early, a Boston travel and history writer of the 1930s and '40s, the original Mother Goose was a real person who lived in Boston in the 1660s.6 She was reportedly the second wife of Isaac Goose (alternatively named Vergoose or Vertigoose), who brought to the marriage six children of her own to add to Isaac's ten.7 After Isaac died, Elizabeth went to live with her eldest daughter, who had married Thomas Fleet, a publisher who lived on Pudding Lane (now Devonshire Street). According to Early, "Mother Goose" used to sing songs and ditties to her grandchildren all day, and other children swarmed to hear them. Finally, her son-in-law gathered her jingles together and printed them."

Or maybe not;

From;

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/393992/Mother-Goose

"The persistent legend that Mother Goose was an actual Boston woman, Elizabeth Goose (Vergoose, or Vertigoose), whose grave in Boston’s Old Granary Burying Ground is still a tourist attraction, is false. No evidence of the book of rhymes she supposedly wrote in 1719 has ever been found. The first U.S. edition of Mother Goose rhymes was a reprint of the Newbery edition published by Isaiah Thomas in 1785."

Personally, I suspect that Elizabeth Vergoose was Mother Goose. It is an old wives tale. In the Return of the Ring, JRR Tolkien pointed out that, sometimes, old wives are smarter than self important men.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Goose


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