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.
By July 1909, Gifford Pinchot, who had been appointed by President William McKinley to head the USDA Division of Forestry in 1898, and who had run the U.S. Forest Service since it had taken over management of forest reserves from the General Land Office in 1905, became convinced that Ballinger intended to stop the conservation movement.