Hello and welcome to my official author's website - a place for you to encounter and hopefully enjoy the things I have written over the years about faith, family, and history.
I am a native and lifelong resident of Watauga County, North Carolina, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, where many of my ancestors settled by the 1790s, resulting in some of my family having been here for eight or more generations. This rich and lengthy heritage sparked my early interest in genealogy and local history and, at the age of eleven (quite a few moons ago!), I embarked on a quest to write books about each of my four grandparents' families. I published three of those over a period of decades and have one more to complete. Beyond these genealogical endeavors, I have also delved into other aspects of my county's history (including a well-known murder case), resulting in the publication of a few other books, ideally with more to follow. Additionally, I have composed quite a few personal reflections about Bible passages, my faith in Jesus Christ, and the Christian life.
I am a graduate of Appalachian State University in my hometown of Boone, North Carolina (BA in Political Science/MA in Education with a social studies concentration) and also worked at the university for nine years before being employed at Samaritan's Purse, a Christian international relief organization, where I have worked for the past twenty-eight years.
Perhaps because I'm blood kin to a number of craftsmen, musicians, and storytellers, I have always needed and enjoyed creative outlets. Aside from writing, I have dabbled through the years in art (pencil drawings in particuar), residential design/decor (enjoying my log home, which sits on part of my maternal grandparents' former farm and has an inspiring view of the mountains), collecting and refinishing antiques, amateur photography, and even a bit of cooking.
I have also had the privilege to travel quite extensively, visiting more than 60 countries through both personal and work-related trips, and I have appreciated the opportunity to expand my worldview in the process. In the words of Mark Twain, “Travel is fatal to prejuidce, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.... Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Again, welcome! If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out. I am glad you are here.
Hello and welcome to my official author's website - a place for you to encounter and hopefully enjoy the things I have written over the years about faith, family, and history.
I am a native and lifelong resident of Watauga County, North Carolina, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, where many of my ancestors settled by the 1790s, resulting in some of my family having been here for eight or more generations. This rich and lengthy...
Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions.
For fifty years, the 1972 murders of Bryce and Virginia Durham and their teenage son Bobby on a bitter winter’s night in Boone, North Carolina were unsolved, but in 2022, the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office announced that their killers had finally been identified. Based on information from...
Prior to its formation in 1849, Watauga County was a hunting ground for the Cherokee and part of the trail blazed by frontiersman Daniel Boone, for whom the county seat was later named. Primarily settled by whites after the Revolutionary War, many of the county’s earliest families came to the Appalachians from the Piedmont region of North...
Ancestors and Descendants of Alf and Letha Watson Yates
This 325-page book outlines the ancestors and descendants of the author's great, great, great-grandparents, Alf and Letha Watson Yates, who moved from Wilkes County, North Carolina to neighboring Watauga County, North Carolina in 1875. It includes many details of Alf Yates's military service as a Confederate soldier, including the Battle of...
His widow, Dora, had found the prosperous forty-one-year-old farmer hanging in their barn on a summer morning in 1900 in rural Iowa. He left no note, but all Dora could figure was suicide.
The pair had married a decade earlier. August, a German immigrant, was more than a dozen years older than Dora. They had three children – two boys and a girl – ages 9, 7, and 5 at the time of their father’s death.
After discovering her husband's suspended body, Dora cut it down and...
As young bachelors in 1840, my great-grandfather’s great uncles, Nineveh and Ephraim Ford, left their native Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for Missouri, but this would prove to be a temporary stopover as their attention was next drawn to Oregon.
Nineveh’s appetite had been whetted by the scenic descriptions within Lewis and Clark’s account of their great expedition some forty years earlier, and his intention to venture further westward was cemented by information he gleaned from...
As children, my mother and her siblings were not allowed to have bicycles. Their father forbade it – not as a form of harsh parenting that denied simple enjoyment, but, in his estimation, as a means to lovingly safeguard their wellbeing. His decision was rooted in what had happened to their cousin, Gordon Spainhour, Jr., who died almost a full year before my mother’s birth.
In the fall of 1938, as a freshman at North Carolina State University, seventeen-year-old Gordon and a friend were...
