Fort Dodge Radio
Bill Grady's Ancestry Sources

There was a time, back when summer seemed to last forever, when I'd spend a week with my grandparents in Gilmore City, Iowa. My grandfather and grandmother, Walter Pitman Grady and Amy Hulse (Mansfield) Grady, would sit with me on their porch in the evening light and tell stories, stories about life in Kentucky, about growing up in simpler times, and about family roots that ran deeper than I could imagine. I was hooked from the start. My grandmother spoke fondly of her father, and though her mother had passed away when she was still young, she knew enough to tell me about the Stouts', about their place in history and how we carried part of that legacy. Those porch conversations were more than storytelling. They planted seeds.

Now I'm a grandfather myself, and the spark they lit all those years ago never really went out. As I began digging into those stories, retracing the lines told to me between sips of 7-Up and the hum of the Iowa breeze, I uncovered a tapestry woven with Walkers, Frys, and founders I never realized were part of my own story. With the help of historical documents, genealogy platforms like FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com, and the precise indexing, organization, and fact-checking that artificial intelligence brought to the process, I was able to turn those childhood memories into something lasting. This isn't just a record of names and dates, it's a tribute to the voices on that porch and the generations that came before. I'm proud to share it with you.

It's not just my family's story. It's my grandparents' gift, carried forward.