Along the windswept dunes on the strip of barrier island wedged between Oregon and Hatteras inlets, the ghosts of long-gone Bankers drift among swaying sea oats and the barbed thorns of prickly pears. Steeped in chartreuse cordgrass and rendered flaxen by goldenrod, the marsh shimmers with generations of islanders lost to time.

Among them are the men exalted by the story keepers — the lifesavers, lightkeepers, fishermen, and boatbuilders, and all their ascribed heroics, stoicism, toil, and ingenuity. It’s their stories that most often inspire writers, poets, and historians.

Robin Daniels Holt photograph by Baxter Miller

But also among the souls are the anonymous — the courageous women who made a life and an impact on a sliver of sand jutting into the sea. Their stories, ones of hardship and bravery, exist only in the pages between those chapters dominated by men. It’s the unwritten and undocumented that captivates Robin Daniels Holt. A local history buff and genealogy researcher, Holt has spent her life at the south end of Roanoke Island in Wanchese.

“There are numerous accounts in books about the men of the Outer Banks,” she says. “But there are many wives, sisters, daughters, and grandmothers whom history has left unexplored.” For Holt, changing that began where most tales end: the cemetery.

• • •

Over the past 150 years, time and tide had rendered their judgment on the Midgett Cemetery, perched on the western edge of Hatteras Island’s Chicamacomico Banks. Storms had bitten away at the shoreline. With every strong west wind, chunks of the cemetery disappeared, exposing graves and tossing headstones into Pamlico Sound. Saving those interred in the shifting sands would be a race against nature. In 2015, a coalition of descendants and community members banded together and began raising money to install a bulkhead to slow the erosion.

A Midgett for at least 12 generations, Holt was, by blood, invested in protecting the cemetery. “When I became involved, I had this realization,” she says. “As I was cleaning their headstones, I realized every person in there was my relative. That is my family.” That epiphany added to her interest in her family history. She continued her already yearslong search so she could better understand who she was, where she came from, and the women from whom she descends.

Between working to preserve the Midgett Cemetery on Hatteras Island and discovering a set of early-20th-century diaries, Robin Daniels Holt was inspired to explore the history of women on the Outer Banks. photograph by Baxter Miller

“When my mother died, I wanted to know what made her,” Holt says. “I wanted to know why she was the way she was, what her life was like growing up. What was my grandparents’ life like? And it just grew from that. I wanted to know what made me.”

The answer has given her a sense of belonging. “When people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ I can say, ‘I’m from right here.’”

• • •

As Holt delved more deeply into her genealogy, the archives at Outer Banks History Center in Manteo became her sanctuary, her vestibule to the past. One day, she learned about a set of diaries from a woman on Pine Island: 46 small journals written at the turn of the century by Lillie Jacob Baum, a physician’s wife, who lived on a pocket of sand wedged between Currituck Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. Spanning 48 years, the diaries offered a rare look at the life of a woman on the Outer Banks in the first half of the 20th century — just a glimpse, really. But a glimpse it was.

“Every day, she wrote something in a little ledger book. They were often brief entries, leaving much to wonder,” Holt recalls. “I thought, there’s so much written about the men, about the lifesavers, the lighthouse keepers, the fishermen, all of it. But there’s nothing about the women. What did it mean for her to keep up a household?”

Curiosity got the better of Holt. From those daily entries, she began peeling back the layers. “There were all these questions, and every time I would answer one, there’d be another. OK, so she did laundry today. What does that mean? Soap wasn’t available, so she had to make it. But soap had to be made six weeks ahead so it could cure, or she couldn’t do laundry.”

From 1900 to 1948, Lillie Jacob Baum kept a detailed account of what it was like to cook, sew, raise children, and run a household on Pine Island in Currituck County. photograph by Baxter Miller

But laundry and all it involved — drawing water by hand from a well, building a fire for the cauldron, drying the clothes in humid, fickle weather, and using irons heated by coals — was but a tiny piece of any given day. With each journal entry from Baum, Holt discovered a new topic to research, unearthing a more complex story about the place and the ingenuity of the women who made the most with the least.

What did it mean to grow a garden in nutrient-deficient sand? Using what they had around them, women collected oyster shells to process into lime fertilizer. Kilns were constructed of mud, sludge, and dried marsh grass, and engineered to withstand intense heat. Oysters were fired and “slacked” to convert the lime to calcium hydroxide suitable for gardening.

What did it mean to make and mend clothes? The process began with shearing sheep and cleaning the wool before combing and dyeing it. Then, using a spinning wheel, the wool was fashioned into thread for knitting or crocheting.

From all of Holt’s questions, a book was in the making: her own.

• • •

In a cottage that sits on the same land where Holt was raised and now lives, waist-high stacks of boxes stand by the front door. “If someone had told me I’d write a book, I would have never believed it,” she says. She points across her living room. “But there they are.” The first printing of My Daily Bounded Realm: A Journal of Daily Life in the Outer Banks in 1900 had arrived the day before. Physical proof that the women of Hatteras Island had a story to tell.

With the ancestral memory of those laid to rest in the sacred ground she was helping preserve, inspired by the diaries of Lillie Baum, and equipped with countless hours of genealogical research, Holt found a muse in her great-great-grandmother Mary Martha O’Neal Midgett. But who was she?

“In the 1900 census, for all the women in Chicamacomico, their occupation was listed as ‘none’ or ‘housewife.’ It didn’t matter if they were a midwife, fisher, or preacher,” Holt says. No matter who her great-great-grandmother really was, on paper, she had been reduced to a binary.

Holt drew on the experiences of her ancestors, especially Mary Martha O’Neal Midgett (center), to compose the journal entries in her book, My Daily Bounded Realm. photograph by Baxter Miller

Holt pondered what Martha would have written in a journal. She questioned what her day held, both the fantastic and the mundane. A vision took shape. “The U.S. government may not have recognized a woman’s contributions [at that time],” she says, “but I’ll tell you what, they all had degrees in domestic engineering, in my opinion. To do what they did with the resources they had …” She trails off, imagining a world without electricity, running water, or paved roads. “They had to be intelligent, staunch women.”

Holt’s genealogy had become not only a conduit to her past but also a window into better understanding the ecology and natural history of the region, lost food traditions, and cultural and community customs. In her book, organized like the diary that inspired her, the brief fictitious journal entries of her great-great-grandmother — each an amalgam of archival research, personal experience, and local folklore — are gateways to exploring the very real history of the place.

Holt gives in-depth historical context to household responsibilities like preparing meals, washing clothes, maintaining fires, fetching water, and raising children, painting a more complete, more colorful picture of life on the Outer Banks. In reality, women were leaders in the revolution of animal husbandry. They played a critical role in the fishing industry by making and mending nets to provide food and income. And they cared for their communities and families as herbalists, healers, and midwives.

Published in March 2025, Holt’s compilation of stories of women from Currituck and Dare counties offers a glimpse into the untold histories of a self-sufficient, resourceful community. photograph by Baxter Miller

Like many women at the turn of the century, Holt’s great-aunt Lucy Mae Midgett’s life was reduced to the household chores she performed. Holt honors her history as a commercial fisherman, decoy carver, builder, and church pastor. She pays homage to the groups of women who made clothing for people rescued from shipwrecks — the only benevolent source of aid once survivors reached land empty-handed. She recognizes Bashi Foster, the self-taught nurse and midwife from Hatteras Village, who ministered and delivered babies for at least 15 years.

A century and a quarter later, Holt has taken a monochromatic history and portrayed a vibrant, complex picture that explores the skills, talents, and ingenuity that define the women of the Outer Banks.

• • •

For a person whose family can be traced to the colonial era, exploring her genealogy is how Holt defines and grounds herself. When tracing ancestry in a place as small and remote as the Outer Banks, the connections can become a tangled web. “I don’t call my genealogy a tree,” she says. “It’s a wreath. It just keeps going around and weaving in and out. Sometimes, there’s a little sprig off this way. But it’s more a wreath than it is a tree.”

It’s an appropriate metaphor, given that wreaths often symbolize completeness. Studying her family lineage to complete her own story has made the story of women whose lives have lain hidden in shadows more visible. Holt has honored their memory by bringing their struggles and triumphs into the light.

Holt continues to help care for the Midgett Cemetery, where she found a muse in her great-great-grandmother Mary Martha O’Neal Midgett, the central character in her book. photograph by Baxter Miller

She still helps care for the Midgett family cemetery. “At least twice a year, I go down there and help keep it cleaned up. Every now and then, I pat Martha’s headstone and say, ‘Martha, I hope I do you proud.’”

Those moments in which Holt communes with the past have made the present all the more complete, blurring the lines between where things begin and where they end, just like the wreath that is her family history.