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Family History
I have a deep and abiding interest in family history that goes back to the late 1970s when I began writing to my one living grandparent and namesake, Lloyd M. Staley. The photograph on the right below is the barn built by Lloyd M. Staley's maternal grandfather, Matthew Benjamin Lamb, probably in the late 1870s. My grandfather's father, Arlonzo, eventually bought the land on which this barn was built, and farmed it until Lloyd bought it from his father in the early 1920s. My father was born on this farm and lived the first few years of his life here. The barn still stands in Franklin County, Kansas, on its original site. The seven essays listed under the barn are my grandfather's family farm memories from the early 1900s.

The following books, published and unpublished essays, and websites reflect some of my work dealing with my family's history.

Happy As a Big Sunflower: Adventures in the West, 1876–1880. By Rolf Johnson. Edited and with an introduction by Richard E. Jensen (University of Nebraska, 2000).

This diary of Rolf Johnson, Lloyd M Staley's wife's maternal uncle, is part of my Swedish heritage. After reading parts of the original diary, I encouraged Rolf's grandson to donate it to the Nebraska Historical Society, and then encouraged the Historical Society to publish it. Rolf's younger brother, George, rode with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show from 1892-1899. Additional information based on my research of George Johnson can be found in Louis S. Warren's Buffalo Bill's America : William Cody and the Wild West Show (Knopf, 2005).

CHOICE 2001 Outstanding Academic Title
Click on the image to the left to read excerpt from this book

StaleyHistory.com
A website developed and maintained by a cousin of mine, with research I did primarily in the early 1980s on my Staley family and related lines.

Letters Home from World War I
Some of Lloyd's letters were featured on the History Channel's program Dear Home: Letters from World War I. The DVD may be purchased. from the A&E website.

Memoirs
Brief biographical sketches of Lloyd's wife, his parents, and his grandparents.

The following seven essays were written by Lloyd when he was in his eighties, and reflect his childhood memories on the Kansas farm in the early 1900s.

A Day on the Farm
Ice Harvest
Apple Butter Time
Butchering Time
Threshing Time
School Days
Spring Planting Time

In March 2002 I began working on the history of my wife's Chinese-American family. The two essays below represent my first forays into this fascinating story. The first link will take you to a prepublication form of the "Gum Moon" essay, and should not be quoted or cited without consulting the final, published version. “‘Gum Moon’: The First Fifty Years of Methodist Women’s Work in San Francisco Chinatown, 1870-1920”
was published in The Argonaut (Journal of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society) Volume 16:1, Summer 2005, and documents the early history of the Woman's Home Missionary Society's "Rescue Asylum" where my wife's grandmother was taken after being rescued from a brothel at the age of five. “Contested Childhoods: The Pacific Society for the Suppression of Vice vs. the WHMS Methodist Oriental Home, 1900-1903” recounts the three-year San Francisco court battle for guardianship of my wife's grandmother, and was published in Chinese America. History and Perspectives 2007. Special 20th Anniversary Issue. Branching Out the Banyan Tree: A Changing Chinese America. Conference Proceedings. Edited by Colleen Fong and Lorraine Dong. (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 2007) 43-54. I have also added an updated and corrected version of that essay (August 2008) here.

I have also worked on the history of my wife's father's family in the United States. It is entitled, "The Mee Yim (Lee) Wong Family History." It is currently not online.

My interest in my mother's Loyalist family roots is represented in an unpublished essay entitled The Ancestry of Ichabod Bowerman, Dutchess County New York.

Personal unpublished materials
From time to time I have fantasized that I am a writer--or even scarier--a singer. The following website and two documents represent my "secret side."
The Sojourners
Yahu, Mudface, and the Animals (An imaginative retelling of the Genesis 2 creation story, with God (Yahu) as a trickster figure.)
A Selection of Poetry 1984-2004 (Many of these poems are haiku, or variations on that form. Many of the poems also deal with biblical themes.)

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