Ancestors

For many years my aunt on my father's side has researched our family tree. It's a lot of fun to hear her updates. Most of my father's lineage goes back to Kentucky and Ohio in the environs of Cincinnati, specifically a tiny town on the Ohio River called Rabbit Hash. It was where my grandfather was born, and many great-grandfathers before him.

But my aunt, using FindAGrave.com, has done some more digging and found some branches of the tree that go before we wound up in Kentucky. The earliest ancestor she found was born in 1434 in Norfolk, England. Then, in the early 1600s, we started to come over to America. One such fellow came over to Salem, Massachusetts (well before the witch trials) and we were also in Jamestown, Virginia as of 1619, which was only twelve years after the colony was founded.

It's in Jamestown that the most interesting story of my aunt's research lies. In 1644 one of my great-great-grandfathers=to-the-nth-degree lived near Jamestown, on a plantation called the Flowerdew Hundred. He was Dr John Woodson, although he wasn't an actual physician, but he did treat people. In 1644 he was out doing his rounds, leaving his wife, Sarah, and two sons at home.

There were tensions between the settlers and the Powhatan Confederacy (Powhatan is the name given to Pocahontas' father, you may recall), as the Indians didn't care for the encroachment of white people. In April, they attacked the Woodson house. Sarah, plus a neighbor, fought the Indians off, killing seven of them (one Indian who tried to come down the chimney she scalded). She hid her sons--one in the root cellar where potatoes were kept, and another under a washtub. They would carry the nicknames "Potato Hole" and "Tub" for the rest of their lives. I'm descended through Potato Hole, so if the Indians had got him I would be a very different person, if I existed at all.

After the Indians retreated, Sarah went out and found her husband's riderless horse, and then her husband, who had taken an arrow in the chest. But it seems that that was the last Indian attack. She died in 1659, but Potato Hole, who became Colonel Robert Woodson, died in 1707.

One other branch of my family tree that bears mentioning was Elizabeth Warner Lewis, born in 1610 in Wales, and emigrated to Gloucester County, Virginia. It seems she was a rebellious sort, as she was ordered to be whipped for disrespecting the name of God. My resistance to religion goes way back. Sadly, she died in 1643, only thirty-three years old.