As you've found, it starts getting tough when you get back to the eighteenth century (and earlier).
The only way I've managed to track down some of mine (unfortunately none of my Staffordshire SMITH, STEVENTON, DUNN ancestors yet) from this period is by sitting in county records offices and ploughing through parish registers.
I write down any and all probable, possible and vaguely possible matches for the surnames, then type them all into a spreadsheet, which I can then sort by surname, man's name, wife's name and then the family groups appear.
Of course, it's annoying when this reveals a marriage, and you have to go back and start on the registers all over again, with the newly found great [insert number of "greats"] great grandmother's surname
The difficulty is that you don't know where John Gough might have been born, though obviously Brewood would be the place to start, and then widen your search to surrounding parishes. If he married 1761, then you're probably looking for a birth earlier than 1745.
Just had a quick google, and it seems that the parish registers for Brewood have been published (available from several suppliers, it would seem, but Amazon.com - the American Amazon, not the British Amazon - has them on a Staffordshire parish registers CD-ROM, which seems to include a lot of Staffordshire parishes, plus some Warwickshire & Derbyshire ) A kindly rootschatter may have the registers on CD/fiche/book, so it might be worth posting a request in the lookup requests forum, if you're not in a position to get to the Records Office or buy your own. In the past I've posted a few lookup requests, but now I'm biting the bullet and buying parish register transcriptions on the (still rare) occasion they're available, as looking myself, I'm more likely to spot the more obscure connections and get the wider picture, than someone who's just looking for a specific baptism/marriage/burial.
