“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau
Kirk Woosley Patton of Fincastle Ancestry Research is a Kentucky native, born and reared in the state’s beautiful horse farm country. He is descended from at least seven generations of Kentuckians, who migrated to the Bluegrass State in the early 1800’s from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. 
Always interested in history, Kirk is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Kentucky, where he earned with honors a B.A. degree in that field of study as well as a J.D. degree. After practicing law full-time in the state of his birth for eighteen years, Kirk combined his love for history and the law to become a professional genealogist in 2011.
Passionate about history and the environment, Kirk travels extensively throughout the United States and Europe, visiting national parks and museums and writing about his travels.
Kirk founded Fincastle Ancestry Research in honor of his native state’s establishment as Fincastle County, Virginia before it experienced statehood in 1792. Many of his ancestors migrated to Kentucky from Virginia in the years just after Kentucky became a state. Kirk has spent more than twenty years researching his ancestry as well as compiling an extensive genealogical record of four generations of descendants of William Woosley, his ancestor and a veteran of the American Revolutionary War.
