The Vaughan from whom Orest Ranum and Janice Ranum Heuer descend is David Vaughan, a native of Wales who came to America circa 1630 and settled in Scituate, Rhode Island. By the 1770s his descendants had moved to Lake Champlain, where two Vaughans married two Beans. One of these young couples were Alanson B. Vaughan and Hepzibeth Bean Vaughan, who left Saranac, N.Y., in the late 1840s and moved with their siblings (among them Thomas Goodrich Bean, Enoch Bean, and Sarah Vaughan Bean) to southern Wisconsin, settling in Arena and Union. Within a decade some of the family had moved northward to Stevens Point and Plover; and Alanson Vaughan and his family had pushed on to Mower County, Minnesota, where they were active in founding the towns of Austin and Lansing. Several of Alanson Vaughan's children headed west after the Civil War. Over the decades sisters and brothers, aunts and nieces, and cousins exchanged information about life on the frontier and expressed great affection for one another.