Uncovering Appalachia’s Hidden Heroines: Pauletta Hansel Reveals Untold Stories in Understory
L.L.: There’s a section early in the book in which you say you will never be someone’s ancestor, that you are searching to the past for clues of your continuation, not ancestral lines, but maybe lines of poetry (paraphrased). I love that, but something about that also feels melancholy. I’d like to think your work — your writing — will survive you. It might be the most lasting legacy we can leave.
P.H.: Maybe. I do think discovering that my own mother, born in 1932, was the first woman in this line who was fully literate became a major impetus for the work. There was no possibility that our foremothers could have shared their stories in a lasting way. I say this in the book, but I know more about Margaret Dawson Wroughton Attawell Grimes, born circa 1596, than I know about my great-grandmother, Sarah Margaret Rhoton Mullins, born nearly 300 years later. Historians are interested in early Jamestown settlers.
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