A Poet Searches for Her Foremothers

Despite the many holes in my information about Margaret, I know more about her life than I do about Sarah Margaret or of any other great-grandmother.  I know that Margaret, nee Dawson or Dauson, Wroughton Attawell Grimes married three times, getting a little richer each time. I know she was a midwife. I have a transcription of her will; through that and a Virginia Genealogist article called “Margaret (__) (Wroughton) (Attowell) Grimes and Some Relatives,” I know, among other things, the colors of the petticoats Margaret passed down to her daughters, that her third husband was somewhat of a rounder, needing special permission to marry as part of an earlier sentence for fornication, and that she received protection after killing that Indian. While the article’s author states “the known scraps must be milked for all their worth,” these scraps are quilts compared to what I have for my Appalachian ancestors. Yet I realize that were I researching African or Native American ancestry, I would be offered only threads, if that.

But poor people’s stories don’t get written down either. Based on census records, I find very few ancestors who could write, and none of them women.. … If I don’t tell their story, no one will. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but it strikes me that the story of my maternal line is a story of Appalachia—gnarly, knotty, and ridden with decay, buffeted by floods, with roots scraped away to power the rest of the country, but our story nonetheless.

I knew finding the women throughout the span of my family’s life on the North American continent would be difficult when I began my work on what became Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia., I was lulled into optimism because locating my tenth great-grandmother, who arrived in 1621, was so easy. Certainly, her whiteness was an undisputed advantage to me as well as to her. She was what is called a tobacco bride: one of about 144 women shipped from London to Jamestown as a money-making venture. Let’s send vetted, nubile women over 4000 miles across the Atlantic to a continent whose white population is primarily single men and charge said men a portion of their tobacco crop for the privilege of marriage. There was a lot of room for error in the Virginia Company’s marriage plot, which I discuss in Understory, but it worked out well for my research. The English kept good records. As one of a limited number of white women on this continent in the mid-17^th century, the name of Margaret Dauson/aka Margery Dawes,— later Wroughton, then Attawell, then Grimes — was mentioned in various court documents and thus popped up often in scholarly articles from the mid-20^th century on due to historians’ interest in our country’s founding, especially around the bicentennial, though it was not until the early 21^st century that all these Margarets became one.
 

Margaret: Her Story

Grandmother, first spark of fire beneath the story which is not
story, mere kindling that flares without the heat of plot.
All scene and character, and that you surely were, a shivered
maid upon the wooden ship, so aptly named, that carried you across.

This story I tell mere kindling, and yet the flames bring heat
to speak more than I know. You, Margaret, sailed on the Warwick, 1621,
a lady’s maid. This “bride ship,” aptly named, carried you, age 25, among
maydes “young and incorrupt,” and you would marry well and often,

more than you then knew, Margaret from the weir, nee Dawson, 1621,
then Wroughton Attawell Grimes. Meager scraps of story to serve as tinder:
maydes “young and incorrupt,” you oldest among them. And you would live.
That’s no small matter. Your name with the few: Virginia’s List of Livinge, 1623,

not yet Wroughton, much less Attawell or Grimes. Living on scraps. You tender
girl. How did you survive that war? How did you wed Ezekiah? Was it love?
That’s no small matter. Your name not yet by his, Virginia’s List of Livinge, 1623.
By 1624, you were Margaret, blacksmith’s wife. Your family just begun.

Girl, you survived Ezekiah, Thomas, Edward. Was it ever love?
Three times a bride from seabound shivered maid.
In 1624, you were Margaret, blacksmith’s wife. Our family begun.
Grandmother, first spark of fire beneath this story which is not done.

Unlike their home country, white female immigrants to the New World could inherit property, so wills are among those court documents. And in the first few generations, my family actually had a little bit of property to pass on. I find a subsequent great-grandmother as a lifetime heir to a portion of her father’s estate; another giving up her dower rights when her husband sold off a piece of land to buy another; a gift of a cow to a brother. A will where the adjective “old” was used to describe her possessions thirteen times.

And then, sometime around the Revolutionary War, it all just stops. I don’t know my fourth great-grandmother’s maiden name. My fifth great-grandmother’s first name is only an educated guess. The men go on buying and selling land and buying more. They go to counter-revolutionary meetings—one big surprise was to find I come from a bevy of British Loyalists part of Delaware’s Black Camp Rebellion. They show up in other men’s journals of migration across the newly formed country using The Great Wagon Road. All the women seem to do is to have babies and die.

Nevertheless, she persisted. Me, I mean. I’m the she. Having set out to write the history of my family, my Appalachian region, and my country from the women’s perspective, I keep scouring documents for mentions of names on census forms and on certificates of marriages, births and deaths. Sometimes I get lucky. My cousin happens upon one great-grandmother’s grave in a small cemetery next to the picnic area in a state park, which leads me to research the circumstances of her burial. That same great-grandmother is miscategorized as the male next of kin on a great-uncle’s World War 1 deployment record.

In truth, after the family arrived in the heart of Appalachia around the beginning of the 19^th century, there is not a whole lot to find out about the men, either. But at least there are land transactions, an occasional mention of a great-grandfather being a minister or on a grand jury, signatures on a petition, a Confederate pension, an estate inventory which included books. A few hints as to the kind of lives they may have lived beyond farming their land and impregnating their wives. But for the women, all I could do was to read between the lines.

Red

Thin thread I pull
without a needle

a petticoat
bought for each

mayde in 1621
Virginia-bound

& yes it is
my fancy this

one red sea-
swept

petticoat sailed
on to 1658

given &
bequeathed unto

a daughter dead
by 1661

and so bequeathed
again beside

two cows
color unknown.

So much depends
upon

a red petti-
coat

bedraggled
in red sandy loam

Pamunkey soil
snagged & patched

& blotted stains
this voyaged

petticoat
more likely

slashed to strips
to catch

the moon-pulled
flow bequeathed

to mother daughter
daughter’s

daughter the way
in 1968

my granny
along the silty banks

of Cutshin Creek
stuffed rags

between my
legs

Lucky for me, I am a poet, not a genealogist or a historian. Poets make much of those spaces between lines, of what is left unsaid. And so, though I never stopped scouring the documents, searching other people’s online family trees, or, especially, reading all I could about the places and times my ancestors inhabited, and included this information as part of the narrative prose of Understory, I also turned to the tools of poetry to breathe, if not life, at least story into my great-grandmothers. The burden of all I did not know transformed into the gift of curiosity. For example, what was it like to be the wife of a frontier circuit rider preacher?  Rhoda, my fourth great-grandmother, answered this question for me in a persona poem about falling in love with both her husband and the Lord at a camp revival. Is that really how it happened? There is no one to tell me otherwise.

My 4th Great-Grandmother Goes and Gets Herself Saved
Rhoda Hill Rhoton, circa 1792-after 1850

I can’t rightly say which of the two
I fell in love with,
him or the Lord.
But no matter who it was
that pulled me from myself
and danced me up the rows
and to that stump of wood
they fashioned for a pulpit,
crying for mercy with every breath,
it was the man
those four months later
took me home.
Elias.
Even the name
sings from a body’s tongue
just like those names he’d read me
from his Bible
with the begots and the begats.
He’d tell me, come here, woman
let’s see who we begat
this time around.
I bore him seven,
four to work the fields
those summers he’d go preach the camp,
and three to do that too,
but also tend the house
and little bit of kitchen garden.
But, oh, I sorely miss
the sight of him
up there in front of all
who swarmed down from the hills
and up from both sides of the river,
his arms spread wide as oak limbs,
the light a-pouring through him
like the evening sun,
calling every one of us
to come to Jesus,
but calling only me
to step into those arms.

Make no mistake, I am not happy about the dearth of documentation of women’s lives, nor of what this means about how women are valued in our society. While I have no evidence that any of my female ancestors could read or write, I have direct evidence that the last century or so of my foremothers could not. This evidence comes in the form of census records and in the case of my grandmother, personal knowledge. I am grateful that my mother, the first woman of her line to be fully literate, left us a 500-page handwritten memoir which friends helped me type to pass on to my family. Among this family is my sister, a librarian whose specialty is the creation and organization of metadata to assist readers in finding what they need. Her daughter, my mother’s only grandchild, is musician, producer and, more recently, a songwriter. And then there is me, who has spent most of my writing life documenting the lives of women in Appalachia and, more recently, the women who brought us here:
    
 Margaret, Joanna, Hannah, Rachel, Elizabeth, Mary, Betsey, Anna, Rhoda, Polly, Eveline, Bettie, Evaline, Sarah Margaret, Etta, Larnie. May they not be forgotten.

Prayer for the Long-Gone Grandmothers

Let there be hands
entwined beneath rough plank
of table. Splintered, calloused, kind.
A feathered glance. A kiss
placed on the secret skin.
Let these lives that bore my own
have lived not only plunge and lift
from rocky soil, not only
fumbled thrust into gaunt flesh
that fills each year with child.
Let there be a rag doll
dangled down to waiting hands.
Soft universe of aproned lap.
Grandmothers, let there be
full-throated laughter
to stave off hunger
ever at the door.

Hansel, Pauletta. Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia. pp. 9-10, 26-27, 38-39, 117, 151-152. © 2026 Pauletta Hansel. Used by permission of The University Press of Kentucky.