Well, I don't know! The only thing I know is that I'm Junior, and have the same name as my father. How my grandfather came across this name is a mystery. I have the typical Brazilian ancestry: Portuguese with more than a few drops of African and Native blood, so it's not a "foreign" name as far as I know. My father says he never bothered to ask, but I just can't believe it. I have always guessed that my father knows more than he says, but I won't be able to extract the information from him. As far as I know, he and I are the only Goytás in the world. (The pronunciation is "Goy-TAH," with the stress on the last syllable.)
I have only two clues about it. The first is a Native tribe that used to live in what is today the Northern region of the State of Rio de Janeiro: the Goitacases. There is an important city in that part of Rio State, called Campos dos Goitacases ("Fields of the Goitacases"). An incredible coincidence (or synchronicity, if you prefer): almost by accident, my mother was born there! There is also a well-known street in downtown Belo Horizonte, where I was born, that takes the name of the tribe - Rua dos Goitacases. But I have no reason to believe that my grandfather's choice has anything to do with the Goitacases tribe.
The second clue is a river Goitá (with a middle "i") in the State of Pernambuco, Northeastern Brazil. I have found out that there are two small towns on the banks of this river, which are called Conceição do Goitá and Glória do Goitá. Since both Conceição and Glória are common Portuguese and Brazilian women's names, I joke that they are my two women... :-) But all my father's family is from the State of Minas Gerais, more than 2000 km (1250 miles) from Pernambuco. As far as I know, my grandfather was never in his life in Pernambuco, which at the time my father was born (1910) was for practical purposes as far away as Tibet for someone living in Minas Gerais. I have been once in Pernambuco, but didn't leave its capital city of Recife and neighboring Olinda; I intend however to go back there some day to visit my two "women-towns."
In Minas Gerais there is also a family with the name "Goyatá," which is fairly well-known there - this is why many people used to mistakenly call me "GoyAtá," with that middle "a" which doesn't exist in my name. Of course, "Goytá" is also not my family name, it's my given name.
An AltaVista search yielded an interesting and exotic surprise, which of course can only be a coincidence. On the home page of a certain Bill Ross, a researcher on computational chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, there is a document about war in Chechnya that contains a reference to a place in that seceding Russian republic called "Goyta," where some troops have been stationed for a while. Of course my grandfather probably never even heard about Chechnya in his whole life...
Since my name appears to be of Native ("Indian") origin, I have looked up in dictionaries of Tupi-Guarani, the most important of Brazilian Native languages, as well as other Native-language dictionaries. No use. I still don't know what my name means, and where my grandfather got it from. If you know a Goytá other than me and my father, or have any hint about the meaning of my name, please tell me.
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