Uncovering Appalachia’s Hidden Heroines: Pauletta Hansel Reveals Untold Stories in Understory
L.L.: This book is really a backward crawl through your family’s ancestry, going to the roots of the family tree, which began in England in the 1600s. One of the jumping off points was a story that your tenth great-grandmother was a “tobacco bride,” meaning she was shipped from England to Jamestown for 150 pounds of tobacco leaves! Let’s talk about that. Had you known anything about this before you started this project?
P.H.: I love answering this question because it lets me honor the late Danny L. Miller, who was an Appalachian scholar and avid genealogist, a friend to me and to so many others. He is one of the persons to whom I dedicate Understory, the others being my cousin, Loretta, and all our grandmothers. At a reading at Northern Kentucky University, where he taught, I overheard Danny telling someone that he could find a family connection with anyone from the Appalachian South. He wasn’t even talking to me! I inserted myself in the conversation to say that I didn’t think he could find mine, mostly because I knew so little about them myself. He kindly asked me for names, and among the oldest I could offer was my granny’s mother on my mom’s side, Sarah Margaret Rhoton of Clinchport, Virginia.
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