Podcast
Every Name Has a Story
True stories from the past, told for today. New episodes explore the people, places, and surprising discoveries hidden within family history.
The Stories Behind the Names
Family trees are filled with names and dates. But behind every name was a life — complicated, surprising, ordinary, extraordinary, and sometimes nearly forgotten.
Names We Carry explores the people and stories hidden within family history: the mysteries that refuse to be solved, the discoveries that change what we thought we knew, and the remarkable lives that can emerge from a few lines in an old record.
These are stories uncovered through genealogy, but they aren't really stories about genealogy.
They're stories about people — and the ways their lives continue to echo through ours.
S1 E1 What Was Hiding Behind the Brick Wall?
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.
S1 E2 The Tator Holes
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.
S1 E3 The Man Who Was Everywhere
When Donna began tracing her Moore family, one ancestor seemed to turn up everywhere: Maryland, the Monongahela frontier, early Kentucky, the Falls of the Ohio, and eventually Mercer County.
His name was Simeon Moore.
At first, his movements looked like the story of an unusually restless man. But put Simeon back into the world in which he lived, and the map begins to make sense. Following Simeon means following rivers—the Potomac, the Monongahela, the Ohio and eventually the Kentucky—and watching the western edge of colonial America move along with him.
Because sometimes, the names we carry aren't people.
They're places.
A Note From Donna
I've spent years tracing my own family history and helping others discover theirs. Along the way, I've learned that genealogy is rarely just about finding another name or date. It's about the moment a name becomes a person—when you discover where they lived, what they did, what they endured, the choices they made, and sometimes the secrets they left behind.
Names We Carry grew out of those moments. These are stories I found while looking for something else, questions I couldn't leave alone, and people whose lives deserved more than a line on a family tree.
Some stories can be proven. Some remain mysteries. And occasionally, the evidence proves that the story a family has carried for generations isn't quite what happened.
Those are the stories I want to tell.
— Donna