brendaegeland

A common web design pattern is to have a primary navigation with the top level pages, and then a separate 
navigation element on each page that shows only those pages related to a common top-most page. This widget helps 
to build those secondary navigation elements.
If your page structure was like this:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>— Our History</li>
<li>— Our Staff</li>
<li>— — Employment Opportunities</li>
<li>Services</li>
<li>— Widget Development</li>
<li>— Gadget Deployment</li>
<li>Contact Us</li>
</ul>
and you added the widget with its default settings to a sidebar, it would create a list like this:
<ul>
<li>About</li>
<li>Our History</li>
<li>Our Staff</li>
<li>— Employment Opportunities</li>
</ul>
on any of the pages in the About subtree. Notice that the top-most ancestor, About, is included as the first element of the list.
<h4>Options</h4>
<ol>
<li>Title. The widget title. If left blank, it defaults to the title of the top ancestor page.</li>
<li>Show Title. Maybe you don’t want a title. Just turn it off here.</li>
<li>Top Page. You can select one of your pages to be the top page, or you can choose Default, which determines the top-most ancestor of the page being displayed.</li>
<li>Menu Class. Gets applied to the outermost <ul> element.</li>
<li>Before Links. HTML to be inserted before links in the list.</li>
<li>After Links. HTML to be inserted after links in the list.</li>
</ol>

Subpages in Context

Lists pages and subpages for a given page, or the top ancestor of the current page and all of the ancestor's descendants

thewebist

A widget for displaying a list of subpage links. The list remains consistent regardless of where you are in the hierarchy.
Other features include:
<ul>
<li>Widget displays only on pages with subpages or on subpages.</li>
<li>List title is a link to the main page parent.</li>
<li>You can specify the link text for the list title, or you can completely hide it.</li>
<li>Sort subpages by Menu Order or Page Title.</li>
<li>Specify the depth of pages shown (all in hierarchy, all in flat list, 1 level, 2 levels, etc.)</li>
<li>Presentation utilizes minimal markup to allow for easy styling via your theme’s CSS.</li>
</ul>

WenderHost Subpages Widget

A widget for displaying a list of subpage links. The list remains consistent regardless of where you are in the hierarchy.

Subpages in Context vs WenderHost Subpages Widget