Bio

I grew up listening to stories — my maternal grandmother's tales of mining camps and covered wagons, elders spinning yarns at family gatherings while cousins plotted their escape. I never plotted my escape. I pulled up a chair and begged for more.

What began as a childhood instinct for story eventually became something more systematic. After a career spanning more than two decades in higher education — teaching, designing curriculum, directing faculty development, and building online learning programs at institutions including Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Yavapai College — I brought the same habits of inquiry to my own family history. The genealogical research program at Boston University gave me a formal foundation. The archives did the rest.

My husband and I live and travel fulltime in our RV — summers near Grass Lake in Michigan, winters in Bullhead City, Arizona, with regular stops to visit children and grandchildren in Colorado and California. He has the great patience and generosity to plan research trips around my work: we have spent time in Cincinnati combing through courthouse records, in Shoals, Indiana tracing courthouse and cemetery trails, in Creede, Colorado where several of my ancestors lived and died during the silver-boom years, and one memorable summer visiting Civil War sites across the South. The road and the archive have become inseparable parts of the same pursuit.

I research the families I come from: Woodruff, Chaney, Staggs, Emmons, and the others woven into their stories. My 2x great-grandfather John Farney Woodruff married six times. My 2x great-grandmother Annie E. Chaney is my abiding brick wall. Their stories, and the lives of the people connected to them, are what this site is for.

I still wake up most mornings thinking, "I've got to write this down." This site is my attempt to actually do it.