Welcome to the Research

If you have found your way here, you are probably someone who understands the particular pull of a name in an old document and the way a census record or a probate file can suddenly make a stranger feel like family.

This is my genealogy headquarters. I am a primary-source researcher with a special focus on the families of the American West and Midwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Woodruff, Chaney, Staggs, Bates, Davis, Helms, Robinson, and the lives woven between them. My husband and I travel the country full-time in our RV, and he has the great generosity to plan our routes around courthouses, archives, and cemeteries. The road has taken us to Cincinnati, Ohio, to Shoals, Indiana, to the silver-mining country of Creede, Colorado, and across Civil War sites that bring the documentary record into physical relief.

This site has a few purposes. Our People holds the profiles of my direct-line ancestors and the relatives connected to them; the family this site is fundamentally about. Alongside them, the Name Index gathers the wider cast who turn up along the way in stories and memoirs - friends, neighbors, and fellow travelers from places like Creede, Colorado, and the beaches of Saipan - so that if you're holding one of those names, you can see where it fits in this family's orbit. The Journal is where I document the research journey, discoveries, dead ends, and the occasional rabbit hole that turns into something extraordinary. The Resources section is a curated collection of archives, databases, and tools I have found genuinely useful along the way.

Whether you are a family member, a fellow researcher working a related line, or simply someone who wandered in out of curiosity, you are welcome here. Browse the journal, borrow from the resources, and if something you find connects to something you know, please reach out. The best discoveries in this work have always come from other people.

Shannon