Editorial Review:
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.
