Orange County, Virginia

Born and raised in Jefferson County, West Virginia, Kaila is a family historian and storyteller devoted to preserving the voices of those who built the region but were too often left out of its written history. A descendant of both colonial settlers and Irish Catholic laborers who arrived in the Bakerton and Harpers Ferry area in the early 1800s, Kaila approaches history not as a list of dates and names, but as a story connecting generations of ordinary people whose hands shaped extraordinary places.