@EpsilonAdmin Thanks for quick response and question.
Yes, my hope was to use the standard WP search widget - but I haven't explored any other option. If there's a better way I'm happy to get guidance 😀
My site has been recently re-created in WordPress after quite a few years of running under Joomla and that Joomla installation had a free plugin called jiFiles (?) which did the document scanning/indexing. A standard search, scoped on file name or a string from within file content, would pull up a list of file names each hyperlinked to the file itself to easily click on for in-browser viewing (or possibly downloading).
I appreciate that there are other WordPress plugins that offer a full document management system but they have a much larger feature set than I need and are also majorly expensive for a small non-profit community web site.