Revisiting Anne Marie: How an Amerindian Woman of Seventeenth-Century Nova Scotia and a DNA Match Redefine American Heritage

When Marie Rundquist first researched her Amerindian ancestry in the New World, based on a “Native American” mitochondrial DNA test result she had received from the National Geographic Genographic project, she raced back in time. Pouring through twelve generations of marriage certificates, parish records, and census data, she found her earliest maternal grandmother, Anne Marie. Her findings were published to an audience in the United States and internationally in an article excerpted from the book, “Finding Anne Marie.” While she had achieved her own goal—to follow her genetic thread (through all the marriage records and surname changes that a maternal ancestry line entailed) until she reached its conclusion—she determined that her quest had not produced the one result she truly desired. She really wanted to learn the untold story of her family's heritage in the New World. The author committed that she would revisit her ancestors, one-by-one, and hear their stories, in full, at a later time. In this book, Revisiting Anne Marie: How An Amerindian Woman of Seventeenth-Century Nova Scotia and a DNA Match Redefine “American” Heritage, Anne Marie's descendant, Marie Rundquist visits Anne Marie's home in Nova Scotia and researches the parish registers, the ancient rolls and census reports, and the National Museum of the American Indian archives for additional information about her family. Throughout the course of the narrative, Marie Rundquist fills in the missing pieces—the history, politics, and the role of her ancestors in shaping our North American heritage—sharing her findings along the way in a lively, conversational journey. Spanning two centuries, from the early 1600s to the mid-eighteenth century, Revisiting Anne Marie engages the reader in the history of a family cut from European and Amerindian (Mi'kmaq) cloth, from the family's early beginnings in Nova Scotia, through its travels from Port Royal to the Fortress of Louisbourg, and finally, after surviving the Grand Deportation from l'Acadie in 1755, its exile in Snow Hill, Maryland. In an early American history that bursts with art, archival information, scholarly references, firsthand observations and photographs, the author interweaves the inter-relationships that comprise Anne Marie's extended family in l'Acadie with the history and politics of the time. Through an overlay of new genetic information, the author challenges traditional perceptions as she brings forth, generation by generation, the diverse society that becomes the foundation of our “American” heritage. The early history of l'Acadie and its peoples, when coupled with Marie Rundquist's landmark DNA finding, and subsequent tracing of a documented maternal ancestry, assumes a new dimension—one that includes a diversity of culture and family lines. The combined Amerindian-French European character of Anne Marie's community in Nova Scotia may have been overlooked by historians who dismissed these families of l'Acadie. A growing interest in ancestry promises their inclusion in history texts going forward and gives the story of these inter-related families a prominence of its own. At the conclusion of a narrative history that follows Anne Marie's family from parish to parish across the Nova Scotia landscape, ending in 1755, when her descendants were deported by the British to a land that would shortly become the United States, a uniquely “American” identity emerges. It is one that saw the beginning of a new Nation, belonging to a people fueled not by the passions of Europe, but by a distinctly North American fire that burns brightly still today. This identity has passed, like a torch, from generation to generation of the author’s family, and Revisiting Anne Marie brings it now to an even wider audience.