The Inheritance of Movement
Unlike her ancestors whose stories conclude with death dates and burial locations, Stacy Marie Davis's story remains unfinished. At forty-eight years old (as of 2024), she is still writing the chapters of her life, still making choices about where to live and how to live.
She carries within her the DNA of Oklahoma dust bowl farmers and Alabama hill country families, of pilot instructors and women who married at fourteen, of people who crossed the country in search of something better and often found only more hardship. Her great-great-grandfather Charles Gaut Davis walked behind a plow in Winston County, Alabama in 1910; her great-grandfather Scott Winfield Davis died young in Phoenix in 1973; her grandfather Richard Van Davis taught people to fly in 1960s California; her grandmother Jean O'Harra moved from Wisconsin to Oregon to Nevada to Arizona to Washington across eighty-five years.
Stacy herself has lived in at least eight different cities across three states—Arizona, Washington, and California. She has half-siblings scattered across the country. She lost her mother at forty-one. She has lived through the late Cold War, the digital revolution, 9/11, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
What stands out most prominently in Stacy Marie Davis's story is how thoroughly she has inherited her family's pattern of geographic restlessness. Just as her great-great-grandfather Charles moved from Alabama to Oklahoma, just as her great-grandfather Scott moved between Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona, just as her grandfather Richard moved from Oklahoma to California to Arizona to Rhode Island to Connecticut to New Hampshire, Stacy has continued the tradition—though her movements trace a more limited geography along the West Coast rather than the sweeping cross-country relocations of earlier generations.
Whether this restlessness represents a search for something—better opportunities, perfect weather, a sense of belonging—or a flight from something else, it has been the defining characteristic of the Davis family for over a century. From the moment Charles Gaut Davis left Double Springs, Alabama in the 1920s, the family has been in motion, and Stacy Marie Davis, born in Arizona in 1976, carries that legacy forward into the twenty-first century.
Her story, still unfolding, is a reminder that genealogy is not just about the dead and buried, but about the living who carry forward the patterns, the DNA, and the unfinished business of all who came before.