Old-Time Remedies & Healer Records
Tracing the Quiet Lineage of Mountain Medicine
📚 Old-Time Remedies and Healer Records Research Companion: A Working Guide to Finding the Midwives, Herbalists, and Healers in Appalachian Records is waiting in the Resource Library.
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Somewhere in your family tree, there is probably a birth record with a midwife’s name on the attendant line, if a record exists at all. Before state health departments required birth certificates, before county health boards required registration, and before a trained nurse-midwife on horseback could reach most Appalachian hollows, the woman who came when a baby was coming was the granny woman. Two ridges over, or at the head of the creek, or just past the old mill, that is where she lived, and that is where a family sent word when the time was near. Her remedies rode in a cloth bag: a handful of dried yarrow, a paper of boneset, whatever the season had allowed her to gather. The knowledge behind those remedies came the same way it always had, passed from one woman’s hands to the next across a kitchen table or a garden row or a hollow lit by a single lantern.
That knowledge was not simple, and it was not one thing. Appalachian folk medicine grew out of at least three traditions that arrived in the mountains separately and stayed wound together for generations. Scots-Irish settlers coming down the Great Wagon Road brought Old World herbalism rooted in British and Ulster folk practice, plant knowledge their grandmothers had used for fevers, wounds, and difficult births long before any licensing board existed. Cherokee communities across the southern highlands had built a botanical pharmacopeia over thousands of years of careful observation. Their use of black cohosh, ginseng, goldenseal, and yarrow was not superstition but tested knowledge, and European settlers adopted those plants directly into their own practice (Hamel and Chiltoskey 1975). African American healers contributed root-working traditions that wove together physical and spiritual care in ways that fit naturally alongside the other streams; as the Smithsonian Center for Folklife documents, those traditions merged with settler herbalism across mountain communities without much ceremony (Smithsonian Folklife 2023). A granny woman did not sort her remedies by cultural origin. What the land gave her and what the women before her had trusted, that was the whole pharmacopeia.
By the early twentieth century, the gap between mountain healing and formal medicine was measurable on paper. A 1922 survey of childbirth practices in eastern Kentucky found that midwives attended 85 percent of all births in the region and outnumbered physicians 14 to 1 (Midwives of Kentucky 2026). Physicians who practiced in remote counties charged between ten and thirty dollars for a delivery. A midwife charged three to five, or took a side of pork, or took nothing when a family had nothing to give (Scott 1993). The women who attended births also treated fevers, set bones, and compounded remedies from what grew on the surrounding ridges. Country doctors knew it too. Physician daybooks from across Appalachia note families who had already tried roots before calling for the doctor, or who had been seen by the local herb woman before any formal care was sought. Those notes are some of the clearest evidence genealogists have that a healer existed in a particular community at a particular time.
State regulations began narrowing the practice through the 1910s and 1920s. North Carolina passed its first midwife registration law in 1917, requiring women attending births to register their names and addresses with the state Board of Health (North Carolina History 2016). Kentucky counted an estimated 2,245 registered midwives by 1925, a number that almost certainly undercounted women working farthest back in the hills (Midwives of Kentucky 2026). Mary Breckinridge founded the Frontier Nursing Service in Leslie County, Kentucky, in 1925, bringing trained nurse-midwives on horseback into remote mountain counties; but traditional midwives kept serving families throughout Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and West Virginia for decades after those nurses arrived (Frontier Nursing University 2025). Licensing did not erase the knowledge. It created paperwork, and that paperwork is now one of the clearest doors into a world the census refused to record.
Many families kept handwritten remedy notebooks alongside their Bibles, recording what to brew for a croupy child, what poultice to lay on a wound, and which root to gather in which season. Collections at East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia hold remedy books, oral history transcripts, and community health materials documenting those practices across the southern highlands (ETSU Archives of Appalachia 2024). WPA writers working from 1936 to 1940 recorded oral histories across the region that name herb women and their families specifically. A neighbor’s recollection in a WPA interview can place a healer in a particular hollow in a particular decade when no official document does, and the full Federal Writers’ Project collection is searchable through the Library of Congress by state and county (Library of Congress 2024).
Old-Time Remedies and Healer Records Research Companion: A Working Guide to Finding the Midwives, Herbalists, and Healers in Appalachian Records
A midwife who delivered half a valley’s babies almost never has her own file in the courthouse. She survives instead in the attendant field of a birth certificate, a county health department registry entry noting who trained her, a physician’s daybook mentioning a patient’s prior herbal treatment, or a granddaughter’s WPA interview forty years later. None of these sources was built to document her directly, and most researchers never think to check them. This companion moves through a healer identification worksheet, the record types most likely to document a healer’s work, a thirteen-state repository guide plus the specific archives holding Appalachian folk medicine collections, a cross-reference guide connecting a healer record to the standard genealogical trail, and a lineage tracker for mapping healing knowledge passed down through your family.
10 page PDF research guide includes:
Healer and Midwife Identification Worksheet with fields for name, role, active years, and a families-served log for tracking every patient or family a healer is known to have assisted
Eight-record-type reference table covering midwife registries, birth certificate attendant fields, WPA oral histories, physician daybooks, family Bible remedy notebooks, census occupation columns, ethnobotanical fieldwork, and Frontier Nursing Service records
Thirteen-state repository and access guide, plus the Library of Congress, for healer and midwife research across the Appalachian range
Named Collections of Note guide covering six specific archives with deep Appalachian folk medicine holdings, including Frontier Nursing University Archives and the Archives of Appalachia at ETSU
Cross-reference guide connecting eight kinds of healer records to the census, vital record, church, and probate searches that confirm and extend them
Healer Lineage Tracker for mapping healing knowledge passed down across generations within a family
Two ruled notes pages
📋 Genealogical Connection: How to Trace Healers and Remedies in Your Family Line
The woman who delivered your ancestor may have left more records than you expect. Knowing where those records live is most of the work.
🌿 Midwife Registries: North Carolina began requiring registration in 1917; most other Appalachian states followed through the 1920s and 1930s. County health departments and state archives hold surviving lists. A registry entry can confirm a woman’s name, district, and years of practice when no other record places her in your family’s history (North Carolina History 2016; Midwives of Kentucky 2026).
📕 Physician Daybooks and Ledgers: Country doctors kept handwritten ledgers that sometimes note a family had already received care from an herb woman before calling for formal help. Those daybooks survive in county historical societies, state archives, and university special collections and occasionally name the local healer directly.
📼 WPA Oral Histories: Federal Writers’ Project interviewers recorded conversations with mountain residents from 1936 to 1940. Midwives, herb women, and the families they served show up throughout the collection, which is searchable by state through the Library of Congress digital portal (Library of Congress 2024).
📖 Family Bibles and Home Remedy Notebooks: Many families recorded births attended by local midwives in the same Bible where they tracked deaths and marriages. Remedy notebooks sometimes survive with the family Bible or in a county historical society and can preserve names that no official record ever captured.
📰 Newspaper Mentions: Local papers ran advertisements for botanic physicians and herb sellers, covered midwife licensing controversies, and published obituaries honoring women who helped bring many children into the world. Searching digitized Appalachian newspaper archives by county and decade can surface names that appear nowhere else.
🤝 Church and Community Records: Rural congregations sometimes noted payments to midwives or healers, particularly in communities where care moved through barter rather than cash. Association minutes and treasurer’s ledgers are worth checking when a woman’s name does not appear anywhere else.
💡 From the Archives: Orlean Puckett, Carroll County, Virginia
In 1889, a neighbor knocked on Orlean Puckett’s door near Groundhog Mountain in Patrick County, Virginia. His wife was in labor. No doctor could be reached, and no other midwife was close enough. Orlean was around forty-five years old, had buried twenty-four of her own children without one surviving longer than a few days, and had never attended a birth in any official capacity. Going anyway was the decision that defined the rest of her life; the next fifty years of it, Orlean spent catching babies.
By the time Blue Ridge Parkway construction forced her off her land in 1939, Orlean had delivered more than a thousand babies across Patrick and Carroll Counties without losing a single mother (Virginia Changemakers 2012). Winter travel meant nailing metal tacks into the soles of her shoes to keep footing on icy mountain paths. When the distance was too far to walk, an old white mule named Roadie made the trip. Not one delivery carried a charge. Census takers recorded her name eight different ways across her lifetime because Orlean could not write it herself, and not one of those censuses listed her occupation (Virginia Changemakers 2012). The pension application filed in 1913 after her husband died is one of the few documents that places her name on paper with a notary’s signature. It records her as a widow. It does not record her as a midwife.
For a researcher tracing Orlean Puckett, the standard genealogical channels produce a thin file: census records with a different misspelling in every decade, a pension application that names her widowhood, and a National Park Service oral history conducted during the Parkway construction that finally gives her a voice (NPS 2024). Virginia’s midwife registration requirements came too late to capture the decades when most of her work happened, so the registry that would have named her occupation directly does not exist. What fills that gap is the oral history record and the family accounts passed through neighbors and descendants. Pull the civic records to place the woman. Pull the oral histories and community accounts to understand her work. Look for the physician daybook entry or midwife registry line that names the occupation directly. When those three layers line up, you have a life the census never thought to count.
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🪴 Why It Matters
The women who attended births, compounded teas, and walked through the dark to reach a laboring mother held Appalachian communities together in ways the courthouse did not document and the census did not count. Their knowledge came from Cherokee plant traditions, from Old World European herbalism, and from the African American healing practices that shaped mountain medicine across the region (Smithsonian Folklife 2023; Hamel and Chiltoskey 1975). Genealogists who go looking for them find that the records do exist; they just require a different kind of searching.
To follow the trail of old-time remedies is to find your way into the most intimate spaces of Appalachian life, where the woman with the herb satchel was often the first person called and sometimes the only one who came.
💬 What healer stories, midwife records, or remedy traditions have surfaced in your own Appalachian research?
If this post gave you something to think about or a new trail to follow, consider restacking it. Every restack puts Appalachian Genealogy in front of someone who might be looking for exactly this. It takes one click and it means more than you know.
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📚 Resource Box:
Library of Congress — Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940 — Over 2,900 oral history documents compiled by WPA writers across 24 states, many covering Appalachian midwives, herb women, and folk medicine practices. Searchable by state and topic. https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/about-this-collection/
National Library of Medicine — Digital Collections — Free online archive of historical medical texts, digitized herbals, and early public health reports relevant to Appalachian botanical medicine and midwifery history. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/
East Tennessee State University — Archives of Appalachia — Manuscripts, oral history transcripts, remedy notebooks, and community health materials including midwife records from across the southern Appalachian region. https://libraries.etsu.edu/archivesofappalachia/subjectguides/appalachiancollections
North Carolina State Archives — County-level birth certificates from 1913 and midwife registration records from 1917 for researchers tracing women who attended births across mountain counties.
https://archives.ncdcr.gov/
Midwifery Today — History of Midwifery in America — Covers the Frontier Nursing Service, the Sheppard-Towner Act, and state-by-state regulatory changes that created and eventually ended local midwife registration lists. https://www.midwiferytoday.com/web-article/history-midwifery-childbirth-america-time-line/
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Sources
ETSU Archives of Appalachia. 2024. “Appalachian Collections.” East Tennessee State University. https://libraries.etsu.edu/archivesofappalachia/subjectguides/appalachiancollections.
Frontier Nursing University. 2025. “History of FNU.” https://frontier.edu/about-frontier/history-of-fnu/.
Hamel, Paul B., and Mary U. Chiltoskey. 1975. Cherokee Plants and Their Uses: A 400 Year History. Sylva, NC: Herald Publishing Company.
Library of Congress. 2024. “American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/about-this-collection/.
Midwives of Kentucky. 2026. “Looking Back to Find Our Way Forward.” https://www.midwivesofkentucky.com/post/looking-back-to-find-our-way-forward.
North Carolina History. 2016. “Midwifery.” https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/midwifery/.
NPS (National Park Service). 2024. “Orlean Puckett.” https://www.nps.gov/people/orlean-puckett.htm.
Scott, Shaunna. 1993. “Grannies, Mothers, and Babies: An Examination of Traditional Southern Appalachian Midwifery.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 2 (1): 77-104.
Smithsonian Folklife. 2023. “Appalachian Folk Magic: Generations of Granny Witchcraft and Spiritual Work.” Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/appalachian-folk-magic.
Virginia Changemakers. 2012. “Orleana Hawks Puckett.” Library of Virginia. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/educator-resources/changemakers/items/show/224.
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