Shirley J. Peterson Williams was born in Hancock, Michigan, in the years following World War II, and spent her earliest childhood with her grandparents, James and Eileen Riippa. She later grew up in a home built on her great-grandparents' farm, surrounded by stories of copper mining, homesteading, and the family's own lumber mill. After teaching middle school for a decade, Dr. Williams went on to build a distinguished career in higher education, serving as a professor, department chair, dean, and provost. In her later years, she turned her scholarly curiosity inward, researching her own family's history through archives, oral accounts, and childhood memory. Road to Winona is the result, a tribute to the Finnish immigrants whose courage and sisu shaped the family she comes from.