Darlene Small Gilligan was Kansas born, a descendant of a 1774 immigrant from Dresden, Saxony, to Baltimore, Maryland. Following the American Revolutionary War, this immigrant family, with their first four little ones, hiked over "The Blue Mountain" through Virginia to settle in Southeast Ohio.  By the third generation it was time to "Go West, Young Man" and the destination was Kansas; the purpose was homesteading.

 In three more generations,  the author's parents returned to the East with their family to recover from the 1930's depression on the Kansas prairie. Their return to Ohio brought them to within 25 miles of Freeport, Ohio, old settlement of the generations of her SPECK family. Elementary and secondary schooling for her and her siblings occurred in Coshocton and Muskingum Counties.

 Higher education and marriage took her to Upstate New York where she was fully involved in community service and church work as a professional officer of  The Salvation Army. She has served as administrative assistant in the office of  Emmanuel Presbyterian Church, later as executive secretary to the director of nursing at our two-campus hospital for fifteen years, with primary responsibility for patient care statistics and for editing, typesetting and publishing the policy and procedure manuals for  the nursing division. Secondary responsibility was teaching  office automation for department heads and executives as the hospital entered the computer age. She programmed the electronic personnel budget system for the nursing units, which became the model for all hospital departments' electronic personnel budgets.

   While she and her husband raised their family of four children and she worked outside the home, she also organized and administered the Sunday School for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Amsterdam, New York for 20 years.