Whaley Genealogy & History. Whaley is a British locational surname, from the villages of Whalley in Lancashire and Whaley in Derbyshire. Both likely come from the Old English hwealf, which means vault, arch or hill, and leah, for a clearing in a forest or a meadow.haley family history starts in 1185 with the recording of Adam de Walleg in the Pipe Rolls of Lancashire. Whaley genealogy lays claim to several notable persons, such as actor Michael Whaley and St. Louis Browns outfielder Bill Whaley.
1 America's first professional forester, and founder of the U.S. Forest Service. 2  Gifford Pinchot was the leader of the utiliatarian wing of the early conservation movement, who served under President Theodore Roosevelt and later as governor of Pennsylvania.  John Muir first met Gifford Pinchot in New York in 1893. Muir traveled with Pinchot and others with the National Forestry Commission surveying the problems of the western forest reserves. At that time, they became good friends.
Indeed, the U.S. Forest Service, founded and developed shortly after the turn of the century by Pinchot, endures in modern times as a solution to the crisis that once faced the forests of our nation. In an era when conservation was new and contrary to generally accepted practice, Pinchot was something of an extremist. The ferocity of his fight for the nation's forest lands and the tenacity of his attachment to his principles evoked the antagonism of the power structure - the exploiters of the nation's wealth.