Woodard Footprints: Tracing the Footsteps of the Viking Woodwards In Normandy to England to Jamestown, Virginia, and Onward to Settlement In South Carolina and Alabama

The odyssey begins, “James Polk Woodard, whose absence in the family graveyard in northwest Alabama led me on a search and the cause of his death in the Civil War.” Merle recalls visiting the cemetery with her family, in the heat of an Alabama summer day, when only four years old. There were six souls sleeping there, including the child Tommy, and she wondered about an empty grave that just might hold the remains of her long searched for great-great-grandfather. And where was James Polk buried? “That night I dreamed of little Tommie who lay in the graveyard. He was killed in a fall from an ox cart when he was only seven, and there were three babies’ graves; all these impressions were entered into the encyclopedia of my mind and have remained there.”