For Pauletta Hansel, who grew up in southeastern Kentucky, the history of her ancestors traces back to her tenth great-grandmother, a "tobacco bride" shipped from England to Jamestown, Virginia, in exchange for 150 pounds of tobacco leaves. After the Revolutionary War, the family migrated from the Chesapeake area to the mountains of North Carolina, and eventually, into the Appalachian coalfields. As Hansel explored archives and artifacts, she found this ancestry was incomplete, remembered solely through the lives of men.

With a captivating and contemplative voice, Hansel's Understory weaves history, genealogy, and poetry to chronicle the untold story of her foremothers. Hansel does not shy away from hard truths, such as her family's enslavement of people of African descent, their support for the Confederacy, and their displacement of Indigenous people. Through research, her travels across the US, and her own family stories and memories, she makes visible those whose lives were hidden between the lines of documents left behind.

In revealing generations of women whose experiences have only been glimpsed within others' narratives, Understory is not simply one family's story--it is a microcosm of the history of Appalachian American women.