You might have noticed that I haven’t published a 52 Ancestors article recently.

You might also have noticed that I’ve been swamped with conference season this fall, and while that’s part of it, there’s more to this story.

A lot more.

I’m sure you’re aware that I’m the family storyteller and legend-keeper – yet I don’t know how to tell you this.

I’ll just warn you up front that not all of this makes sense – at least not logical sense as we know it on this side of the veil.

Grab a cup of coffee or tea as I screw my courage up to begin.

You see, my ancestors called me.

Not only that, they had been calling me for a very long time.

The Calling

I surely wish I knew how to explain this – that I possessed adequate words.

The ancestors have been calling me for a long time. A cacophony of voices, each seeking to be heard. Much like the din of voices in a noisy restaurant. You can’t hear any one person, and you surely know there are voices, but you have no idea that any of them are speaking to you.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my draw to genealogy and family history was their voices beckoning – except too jumbled for me to hear. Yet, I heeded the call, masked as curiosity. Mother apparently heard it, too. Sometimes, she would come up with tidbits, pieces of information that she “just knew” but had no idea how she knew. And you know something, she was always right.

Every. Single. Time.

Even though many of them wouldn’t be proven or confirmed for years or even decades later.

I didn’t think too much about it back then. But trust me, I’ve thought a LOT about it recently.

Sometimes, my insistent ancestors lasso other people into this drama, too. Sometimes, as unsuspecting accomplices, encouraging me. Sometimes, as people who have access to records that the ancestors need me to have as pieces of their story. Sometimes, as a passerby with just the right scrap of information – or the right direction. People literally stopped me on the street. Or perhaps, ancestors shapeshifted and took the shape of someone who had disappeared into thin air when I turned back around to ask them for clarification. Perhaps.

So much of this journey has just been surreal.

Talk about unnerving.

At those moments, all you can do is swallow and walk forward into whatever awaits – just hoping and praying you’re in the right place, and safe.

Yes, safe. When you see where I was “shepherded to” as I share this journey over the next few months, one ancestor at a time, you’ll understand.

Ancestral Fate

Sometimes, after you’ve followed an inexplicable path, you find yourself standing exactly at the juncture of fate.

Fate that changed lives. Your ancestors’ lives. Not simply one of them, but all of them living at that time in that place. In an instant, it shifted the trajectory of the lives of countless generations of descendants. Changed the very essence of my life. Had that historic, fateful juncture not occurred, I wouldn’t be here and certainly wouldn’t have been standing there.

Through the thinness of the veil, I could hear their voices, their cries, sometimes bloodcurdling screams. Palpably feel their fear as it rose in their throats and then, standing in their footprints, rose in mine.

Yes, they called me. Summoned me.

I had absolutely no idea the journey I was about to undertake.

I have only ever been on one other journey in my life that shifted time and stirred my soul with wave after wave of overwhelming emotions. An earlier journey I have never written about and shared with few.

This time, this journey, I’m sharing. With you.

I am forever changed.

Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia wasn’t Nova Scotia when this odyssey began for my ancestors. My Mi’kmaq ancestors referred to the lands where they lived as Mi’kma’ki, pronounced something Migmawgee. They were stewards of this land for more than 10,000 years, leaving their petroglyph art and secred legends.

Vikings visited before European fishermen and explorers began to arrive offshore in the 1500s. In the early 1600s, the French were establishing mutually beneficial trade relationships with the Mi’kmaq people.

The Mi’kmaq were entirely unaware of what would befall them. Diseases against which they had no immunity would devastate their population, and eventually, hordes of colonizers would all but displace them from their ancestral lands. Like the French who became Acadians, the Mi’kmaq, too, would become victims of European wars.

However, in the early 1600s, most of that was still in the future.

By the 1630s, the southern coastline of Nova Scotia, then known as Acadia, served as a fishing grounds punctuated with a few French trading forts. The French warred and argued among themselves, as people are wont to do, but for the most part, the Mi’kmaq people were impervious to the quarreling of their trading partners.

In time, European men, mostly French, sought to take wives among the Native women, and deeper alliances were formed – those of blood.

By 1632, encouraged and financed by a minor French nobleman, a few French families had settled at La Have. I will take you there on my journey, but not today. By 1636, the center or capital of Acadia was moved to Port Royal as additional French settlers and families arrived. Port Royal consisted of just a few houses and a fort.

It’s there, in historic Port Royal, later renamed Annapolis Royal in 1710 after being taken over by the English, that Acadia as we know it unfolded.

It’s there, in historic Port Royal, and for a dozen miles upstream, that I waded through marshes, climbed dykes and fortified ramparts, and communed with my ancestors. I was escorted into the marshes by newly-made friends, some of whom turned out to be cousins. I was drawn and guided to the remains of the foundations of my ancestors’ homesteads, their orchards, fields, and the wells that sustained them.

I trekked in the company of a friend from years back who I met when he was searching for his biological parents. We wound up being cousins through several Acadian lines and had a tearful, joyful reunion in our joint homeland.

We stood where our ancestors stood. Walked where they walked, and sobbed where they sobbed. I felt both their fear and unbridled joy.

I realized that my DNA permeates every inch of this land. This is the land of my ancestors.

What I didn’t understand was that they had been calling me for decades. This wasn’t my first trip to Nova Scotia – but it was the first time that I understood.

Chester, Nova Scotia

In the late 1990s, before the days of cell phones with cameras, I accidentally spent time in Chester, Nova Scotia, attending the Embroiderers’ School of Advanced Study.

By accidentally, I mean that I traveled to Chester, Nova Scotia, a small town not far from Halifax, with a few fiber artists for the purpose of art quilting and inspiration.

The inspiration I hoped for and expected was for a quilt and to sharpen my artistic skills. What happened was something else entirely.

I had absolutely NO IDEA at that time that not only was this chapter 1, but it was the first page of the first chapter. This book is not yet complete.

I thought it was just an artist’s retreat.

I received inspiration all right, but not exactly as I expected.

I Am a River

The resulting quilt that I finished months later was titled “I Am a River.”

Yes, indeed, I am that river with all its twists, turns, and rocky protrusions. Fluid, changing, morphing.

My life had changed courses dramatically through events quite outside my control. Death and destruction of lives. Rebirth and recovery. That’s what I thought I was working through.

The instructor realized that something else was going on. Something besides quilting and fabric selection. Something besides good food and companionship.

Perhaps life is art, or art is life. Perhaps our art is influenced by forces far deeper than we know.

While the instructor lectured about color selection and other artsy things, I was increasingly fascinated by something, or some things, outside the window. My mind wandered aimlessly elsewhere.

We gathered for our classes on the second floor of a beautiful historic building, lined with rock walls and old wooden fences.

I was fascinated and enthralled.

I realized that I loved the sea. The maritime landscape beckoned to me as if it was a living thing.

Boats were moored at the docks and anchored in the harbour, bobbing up and down rhythmically on gentle waves. Beautiful leaves and foliage graced rock walls. And the water, the mesmerizing sea, drew me in.

Drew me out.

Drew me away.

The instructor did something very unusual.

She dug her sketchbook out of a bag, along with a box of watercolor crayons, offering them to me. I felt very self-conscious and somewhat embarrassed. I was “that” ill-behaved student. I explained to her that I wasn’t a painter, not a watercolorist – in fact, I had never used that medium before. I didn’t even know watercolor crayons existed.

She was encouraging and told me it didn’t matter. She said to take my camera, her sketchbook, and a box of crayons that turned to watercolor when you rubbed water over them after you colored and just go out and walk. Follow my heart. The sketchbook was my diary, and I was to simply go enjoy myself.

She didn’t have to tell me twice.

I walked and walked. For days and miles, mostly along the water. Oh, I went back and sewed a bit and ate with the group most of the time. However, my classmates seemed to be much more interested in my adventures than I was in theirs. I felt rather naughty, given that I wasn’t really doing what I was “supposed” to be doing. At least I didn’t think so back then.

Now, I realize I was doing EXACTLY what I was sent there to do.

And what an adventure I had!

I even met the local police when I got stuck wiggling under a thorny bush beside a tree that I had crawled under, before realizing it sported fine-as-frog-hair needle-sharp thorns.

I was taking pictures of the stunningly beautiful sunset and foliage over the bay, but all the officers could see was a pair of legs sticking out from under a bush. Backing out was painful, and funny. After they got me unstuck, we all had a good laugh, and they showed me an easier photo location. My fellow artists saw me in the squad car, and by the time I returned, they had already created a MUCH better story. We laughed and laughed!

Everyone was incredibly nice and had suggestions and stories about picturesque locations and what to order in the various restaurants, all waterfront. By the end of the week, everyone in town knew me.

Yes, these pictures are awful because I scanned them more than two decades later. But they are also precious in so many ways.

They foreshadowed the path my life would take. I was metaphorically as well as actually at a fork in the road, a road that would one day bring me back home. To Acadia.

I had no idea that this sun-kissed and wind-swept place was already deeply etched in my psyche and carved into my heart.

I had no idea I was following my soul and that what I “heard” out there was the collective voices of my ancestors calling. Beckoning me.

I had no idea that one day, I would return.

Yes, they were speaking to me, even back then.

I was entirely unaware that I had any connection to Nova Scotia or even Canada or New England. That brick wall wouldn’t fall for at least another 10 or 15 years, and even then, in the strangest of ways.

Acadian Connection

Mother’s grandfather, Curtis Benjamin Lore was Acadian on his father’s side. Of course, Mother didn’t know that, and neither did her mother or her aunts. No one knew that family secret.

I discovered why just a few years ago, long after Mom had joined our ancestors. Our Acadian family was filled with layers of drama.

In fact, Curtis Lore’s father, Anthony, or Antoine Lore as he was baptized in the Catholic church in Quebec, left all churches altogether. Not only that, but he also left Canada for Vermont where he married before moving on to Pennsylvania with his bride. He might or might not have been a river pirate.

Mystery swirls around Anthony’s life and the circumstances of his untimely death and no one but no one talked about that. His wife, Rachel Hill, died shortly thereafter, leaving impoverished orphans trying to make their way in the world. Curtis Lore, their son left it all behind. A chance overheard conversation led me to a cousin in Pennsylvania who helped unearth that part of the story, one boulder at a time.

It took years and a completely unrelated “chance encounter” in North Carolina that led me to Blairfindie in Quebec, and, eventually, Antoine’s 1806 baptism.

Years later, another “chance encounter” with just the right person provided confirmation that the man in Vermont was the child born to Honore Lore and Marie Lafaille.

If you’re thinking this is the strangest thing ever, with all of these “coincidences,” welcome to my world.

I eventually was able to track those ancestors in Quebec, and somehow, against all odds, connected the dots and bridged the seemingly insurmountable gap between the late 1700s in Quebec, back through New England, and then to Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia in 1755 where the truly unfathomable and unspeakable had happened.

How did I ever manage to navigate those fraught waters? Eventually, DNA helped a lot in the bigger picture, but connecting the dots with individual people was extremely challenging, especially given the lack of records or even a location in New England.

There were so many synchronistic “coincidences.” After an uncanny number of coincidences, I came to question if they really were coincidences.

There were surprises, too.

Native Ancestors

After DNA testing began, I was completely shocked to learn that my mother and I both carried Native American DNA. How was that even remotely possible? It was surely an error. Yes, it had to be. Everyone in her family except for that one grandfather, who I didn’t yet know was Acadian, was either German or Dutch.

But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a mistake.

Then, I assumed our Native DNA came from Pennsylvania where Curtis Lore lived, once we figured that out – but, again, I was wrong. It didn’t. It came through the Acadian lines in early Nova Scotia – a word I didn’t even know yet at the time I discovered Mother’s Native American genetic heritage.

I needed to associate a person with the genetic evidence, but that seemed impossible, given that I couldn’t even figure out Curtis’s parents’ names initially.

Years later, I was able to positively identify one of Mother’s Native American ancestors by combining autosomal DNA testing and ethnicity segments with mitochondrial DNA results of matrilineal descendants of my Mi’kmaq ancestor whose name we don’t know.

We do know she married Philipp Mius and had daughter Francoise about 1684. My Mi’kmaq ancestor didn’t join Philipp in the French Acadian villages. He joined her in the Native villages, up and down the southwest coast of Nova Scotia, including the islands off Chester, Lunenburg, then known as Merliguesch, and Halifax. None of those locations had English names at that time.

Yes, my ancestors lived on and frequented the exact islands I photographed in the 1990s before a future series of coincidences revealed those ancestors and their history.

What are the chances?

Those ancestors were loudly insistent.

Metamorphosis

By the time 2023 rolled around, my life had metamorphosed and changed completely from that of the 1990s. Morphed much like caterpillar emerging as a butterfly from a cocoon and drying its wings.

Discoveries about my Acadian ancestors were flowing like a waterfall, one after the other. Many were shocking, incredibly sad, and horrifying. At the same time, they spoke of incredible courage, bravery, and fortitude.

At first, I was thrilled to break down those brick walls one after the other – but ultimately – I realized that my role was to research, reveal, and document their struggles, loves, and lives as they lived them.

One day, it dawned on me – at least a few of them survived genocide. I never realized the 1755 deportation, or Le Grand Dérangement, the great upheaval, as they called it, was cultural genocide – a crime against humanity. Many people simply disappeared into the abyss of the unknown.

You can’t tell the good without the bad. You can’t document the wins without the losses. Someone needs to tell their individual stories, and I’m doing exactly that.

This had probably been my calling all along.

Generational Trauma

I never understood what generational trauma was or what it meant before I met my Acadian ancestors.

I understand generational poverty all-too-well, and that children suffer from the unfortunate cultural circumstances of the families into which they are born. Circumstances they often cannot escape.

What I never really considered was that generational trauma can span centuries, cultures and many, many generations. Leaving your homeland isn’t enough to escape. I have to wonder how much of this cumulative trauma has been seared into our genetics – epigenetics – genetic memory – whatever.

Does it also lead us home?

Homecoming

Can you experience a homecoming to a homeland you’ve never been to before? Can it feel so incredibly familiar that it moves you to tears? Just simply “being” there? Touching the soil? Feasting your eyes?

Yes, I had been to Chester as an appetizer decades ago, but I had never been anywhere else in Acadia, which spans all of Nova Scotia.

Can generational memories somehow lead and bring you to places you aren’t even consciously aware of? Those places that were the pivot points where your ancestors’ lives were uprooted and changed forever? Is there some unseen force guiding or sometimes pushing us?

Do descendants carry the markers in some way of cultural genocide?

Is there a path back for us? Are the events and memories seared into our ancestors’ souls passed down to us in some way?

How can one possibly be so connected to a place you’ve never been before?

I don’t have answers.

Three Weeks in August

I spent three weeks in August 2024 on the ground in Nova Scotia, tracing my ancestors’ collective footsteps, beginning along the LaHave River, visiting locations I knew that my ancestors had visited and lived.

They sent messages and guided me, including through one man I had just met a few minutes earlier. He took me aside and very uncomfortably said to me, “Don’t think I’m crazy. I can’t believe I’m saying this to you – but your ancestors know you’re here. They are here with you.”

Imagine my shocked look as my mouth fell open. But he wasn’t finished.

“Also, your mother. Is your mother with you?”

What a question.

Yes, mother was with me in multiple ways. Her body had departed this realm in 2006, but this was “her trip” and was she ever with me.

I was also wearing Mom’s ring, the one given to her as a teen by her grandmother, the wife of her Acadian grandfather. She wore it every day of her life, and I wore it on this adventure, taking pictures of “her” in her ancestor’s locations.

Each successive place we visited offered additional adventures of its own. I’ll be taking you along with me as I finish processing not only the photos and research, but the incredible avalanche of emotions.

Let me share just one extremely poignant moment.

The Expulsion

In 1755, following over a century of escalating tensions between the Acadians, who had peacefully lived and farmed in Nova Scotia, and the British, who sought to control the region, the British ultimately succeeded in forcibly deporting and expelling the Acadian population.

Acadian families were rounded up and kidnapped, their farms burned in front of their eyes, their livestock shot, and their dykes that kept the sea at bay from their fields were destroyed. The British wanted absolutely no question in the minds of the Acadians that there was nothing to return for. They had no homes left. No fields. No family. Nothing.

The British fleet anchored in the harbour beside Port Royal which had been renamed Annapolis Royal when the British defeated the French in 1710. The Acadians had previously experienced sporadic attacks by the British where they burned and pillaged, but then went away again.

That’s what the Acadians expected this time, too, but it’s not what happened. The Acadians thought they were safe because the British needed the Acadian farmers to feed the British soldiers, but they were wrong.

The harbour beside Fort Anne in Port Royal was safe and protected from the Atlantic, but ships could not pull directly up to the town itself because the river was tidal and too shallow near the shores.

That was another form of protection from attack.

In 1755, the British decided to end the conflict with the Acadians once and for all by rounding them up and deporting them. Their lands would then be distributed to the much more easily controlled non-Catholic colonists from New England.

The British ships came to anchor in the bay. The Acadians prepared for soldiers to attack and force them to sign a loyalty oath to the British Monarchy.

Instead, the British came ashore and held the men at the fort while rounding up the women and children.

I knew that every one of my ancestors had stood on this hallowed ground at the fort in Port Royal during their lifetimes. Some defended the fort. Some traded there. Some died there. Everyone worshipped there, as the original church was located beside the cemetery.

The original land before the fort was extended and fortified between 1705 and 1710 had belonged to Abraham Dugas. the armorer, who married Marguerite Doucet, Simon Pelletret who married Perrine Bourg, Jacque Bonnevie, military corporal and blacksmith who married Francoise Mius, Guillaume Trahan whose wife is unknown, and possibly Martin Aucoin.

My ancestors had been born, were baptized and married, lived, and were buried on the land under my feet. This fort, cemetery, and Catholic church that had once stood here was the one location that every single Acadian ancestor has unquestionably been – not once but regularly. The hub of their lives.

Not one or some, but everyone. It represents an entire group of people who were isolated to their own community with no newcomers. Everyone was related. That’s part of the power of this place.

Tears streamed down my face.

Earlier generations, before the deportation, were buried in now-unmarked graves in the cemetery at the fort, established before the Catholic church was burned. The fort, church, and cemetery were the center of the town of Port Royal.

In 1755, many of those graves would still have been fresh – and marked.

I walked around the fort grounds several times over multiple days, understanding the central place in the lives of all Acadians.

On the last day, I noticed something off to the side, across the ramparts, extending into the water. This was actually outside the fort, kind of behind the end of the current town. The building in the photo at right is a municipal building housing the police station.

I was drawn to this…thing…whatever it was. But I couldn’t exactly get there.

The hill descending to this walkway of sorts was very steep. It overlooked the land across the river that had been the homesteads of the Doucet, Bourg and Leveron families – also my ancestors.

By the time I found this small peninsula of land, it was late in the day, nearly sunset, and I was exhausted. I had been ill the week before my trip to Nova Scotia and not fully recovered – but nothing was stopping me now.

I had to get down there somehow.

I walked part way into town and around, behind the police station, and discovered stairs descending to the river level.

When I was leaving, I saw a sign and walked over to see what it said. I’m telling you this out of order so you understand what’s coming.

Good heavens! I had stumbled onto the deportation wharf. I had absolutely no idea it still existed.

The physical location where my ancestors’ lives were ripped apart in 1755.

Where they and their unsuspecting children and family members were shoved into rowboats, rowed out into the river, and deposited onto different ships. It was chaos. No one knew what was happening.

Families, in those horrific hours and minutes, carrying only what they could, were eternally separated – never to find or see each other again.

Many searched until death.

Where did death befall them? In many cases, we simply don’t know. Some overcrowded ships sank. Others, as poverty-stricken refugees, were buried and forgotten in anonymous graves where they landed among people all too unhappy to see them.

In most cases, we have no idea where they were – as the ships were intentionally separated and sent to different colonies so that the Acadians couldn’t scheme to return home.

God rest their souls.

I walked out onto the wharf and back in time into their lives.

The fort ramparts were to my left.

The wharf in front of me, now grass-covered, was a one-way ticket to Hell. 

A death march for many. Torturous for all.

How could the British do that?

Much like Hitler’s minions in the 1930s, “just following orders”?

Torture.

Murder.

Genocide.

I reached the end of the wharf where there were only stones, preventing today’s wharf-walkers from proceeding into the endless waters.

Yellow roses for their broken hearts.

The harbour where the ships anchored, and the exit into the Bay of Fundy – the last the Acadians would ever see of their beloved Acadia.

I could see the fort behind me, just as they would have. Originally their fort, but long-since the British fort.

The ships were anchored here. Boats rowed by British soldiers from the wharf to the ships loaded unwilling and probably sobbing Acadians.

No one knew where their family members were.

Standing on the beach, the edge of the town to my right.

A panoramic from the wharf of a now-empty, deceptively tranquil, harbour, but filled with ships taking the Acadians to God-knows-where back then.

I stood here for a very, very long time, realizing that their lives and families were ripped from them. Their agony is still palpable. They did absolutely nothing, aside from simply existing, to deserve this.

We have literally no idea what became of many of these people, or their children. I’m certain that this list of my ancestors is not comprehensive.

• Marie Charlotte Bonnevie, born about 1703, married Jacques Lore/Lord, and died after 1742. Nothing more is known.
• Jacques dit Montagne Lord/Lore, born about 1678, married Marie Charlotte Bonnevie, was probably deported to New York and died in 1786 in Quebec.
  • Honore Lore/Lord, born 1742 to Jacques Lore/Lord and Marie Charlotte Bonnevie, fought in New York in the Revolutionary War and died in 1818 in Quebec.
• Jean LePrince, born about 1692, married Jeanne Blanchard and died sometime after 1752, probably either in Les Mines or after deportation.
• Jeanne Blanchard, born about 1675, married Jean LePrince, death unknown
  • Marie Joseph LePrince, born in 1715, married Jacques DeForest, and died after 1748, probably in Connecticut.
• Francoise Dugas, born 1679, married Rene DeForest, son Jacques DeForest. She may have died about 1751 or perhaps during or after the deportation.
  • Jacques DeForest, born in 1707, married Marie Josephe LePrince and died in Connecticut sometime after 1763.
    • Marguerite DeForest, born in 1747 to Jacques DeForest and Marie Josephe LePrince, died in Quebec in 1819.
• Rene Doucet, born about 1678, married Marie Anne Broussard, death unknown
• Marie Anne Broussard, born in 1686, married Rene Doucet, death unknown.
  • Anne dit Jeanne Doucet, born in 1713, married Daniel Garceau, was deported to Connecticut, and died in 1791 in Quebec.
  • Daniel Garceau, born in 1707, married Anne Doucet, was deported to Connecticut, and died in 1772 in Quebec.
    • Appoline dit Hippolyte Garceau, born in 1742 to Daniel Garceau and Anne dit Jeanne Doucet, deported with her parents and died in 1788 in L’Acadie, Quebec.

Of course, it’s not “just” these people – it’s their families too. Children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews, and sometimes, elderly parents.

Cruelly separated. Gone where?

On December 8, 1755, at least 1664 men, women, and children, all of whom were related to each other, often in multiple ways, suffered this fate – launched into sure and certain Hell from this wharf.

Eventually, I turned and walked back up what’s left of the wharf, knowing that they never had that privilege. They would have given anything to do what I just did.

I walked for them – even decades and centuries later. I felt their agony as they watched this land that they loved become more distant and then disappear, a dot in the distance, as their ship sailed into oblivion. They had never known any other home or lived anyplace other than Acadia.

What were they to do?

How would they survive?

My heart is so very heavy.

The enormity of this genocidal tragedy overwhelmed me and still does. One doesn’t “recover” from something like this.

I walked a block or so into the town where they had once lived, then onto Hogg Island, formerly owned by Jacques Bourgeois, also my ancestor, watching the sun set as I walked – as I knew they had done hundreds of times in their lives.

They must have watched the sun set over their beloved Acadia from the frigid decks of those ships, slipping behind the mountains and winking goodnight – unaware that it would be the last time for all of Eternity.