What do a seven-foot musket, a washtub, and a hole used to store potatoes have to do with nearly four hundred years of family history?

In this episode of Names We Carry, Donna follows the story of her ancestor Sarah Woodson, whose family arrived in Virginia in 1619 and survived two devastating attacks on the English settlements along the James River.

According to a Woodson family tradition passed down for generations, Sarah's husband was killed during the 1644 attack, leaving her to defend her children. One son was supposedly hidden beneath an overturned washtub. The other was concealed in a potato hole—and his descendants became known as the “Tater Hole Woodsons.”

There's even an enormous surviving musket associated with the story.

But how much of it can actually be documented?

Donna follows the evidence from seventeenth-century Virginia through generations of Woodsons, Lewises, Adamses, and Triggs, exploring the sometimes-blurry line between documented history, inherited memory, and family legend. Along the way, the Tater Hole branch produces some surprising distant cousins—including Jesse Woodson James.

Because sometimes the most interesting question isn't simply whether a family story happened exactly as we've been told.

It's why a family kept telling it.

In this episode: Sarah and John Woodson • Flowerdew Hundred • the 1622 and 1644 Virginia attacks • the Woodson musket • the Tater Hole and Washtub Woodsons • family tradition and historical evidence • Jesse Woodson James • Virginia and Missouri genealogy

Welcome to Names We Carry.

In this premiere episode, I’m introducing myself—and the kinds of stories I’ve spent more than a decade uncovering.

It begins with a genealogical brick wall and a road trip to a tiny Kentucky town, where I arrived just days after an 1850s boardinghouse had been demolished. What remained was a pile of old red brick, a souvenir I probably shouldn't have taken, and a family story far more complicated than the one I had gone there to find.

Consider this episode part introduction, part trailer, and a glimpse of what’s ahead: DNA mysteries, forgotten histories, unexpected connections, and the people whose choices still echo through our lives generations later.

Because sometimes the most interesting part of a family tree is what was hiding behind the brick wall.