Ashanté Nicole Eve-Lyn is familiar with the phenomenon of new acquaintances blurting out, “So, what are you?” in reference to her ethnic background.
“I’m black, but I’m very fair-skinned, so people say, ‘That can’t be it! You must be something else,’” she explains. “And I say, well, my family is multicultural and multiethnic, but I am a black woman; that’s how I identify.”
Despite this confident response, Eve-Lyn admits feeling some confusion over her family heritage. While she grew up hearing stories about her relatives and flipping through family photographs, there were a few idiosyncrasies she could never quite place – her great-grandmother’s devout Catholicism and fluent French, for instance.
Eve-Lyn, who now works in fashion, says her hometown in Rockland County, New York is something of a conservative hamlet. There isn’t a lot of diversity – and she never really found a “group” of peers that she fit in with at school. “I didn’t necessarily have a sense of who I was,” she says. “So, finding something to identify with … that’s what really drove me to dig into my ancestry.”
Digging for roots
After her great-grandmother passed away, Eve-Lyn began investigating her family background on ancestry.com. She assumed she’d hit a dead-end somewhere on a southern plantation, or, if she was lucky enough to find more distant details, somewhere in Africa. She knew a few basic facts: her great-grandmother had moved the family from Canada to New York some years ago, and the family had since spread to various corners of the US – Ohio, North Carolina, Atlanta. Ashanté also knew of loose connections to Canada’s indigenous Mi’kmaq people, as well as French and Swedish roots.
“The assumption is pretty much that if you’re black and from Canada, you got there through the Underground Railroad,” she says. “I got on [ancestry.com] to figure out where we came from, to see if I could trace my ancestry to slavery and maybe get an idea of what region of Africa I was from.”
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Photo: Courtesy of Ashanté Nicole Eve-Lyn; Composition: The Guardian Labs US
Eve-Lyn’s suspicions that she’d hit roadblocks turned out to be accurate on her father’s side: he’s Barbadian, and she couldn’t find much information dating earlier than her paternal great-grandfather. But on her mother’s side, she found a surprisingly robust family tree: 10, 12, even 16 generations’ worth of data. “I thought to myself, ‘Why is my family so well-documented?’” she says.
Eve-Lyn’s findings provided answers to a few lingering questions about her family’s global footprints. She discovered ties to the lieutenant governor colonel of the first Acadian colony in Nova Scotia. She also found out that she has royal blood: Her 16th -great-grandmother is Catherine de’ Medici, an Italian noblewoman and French queen who lived in the mid-1500s and was a member of the Medici dynasty.
“It was kind of surprising and enlightening,” says Eve-Lyn. “My family has always been creative and involved in the arts … to find out that someone in my ancestry comes from one of the families that spearheaded that whole scientific, cultural and artistic movement in Italy … I was very proud of that.”
The road ahead
Eve-Lyn plans to continue her genealogical research. She wants to visit a local museum in Nova Scotia that’s rumored to contain information about her ancestors. She’s also learning French and hopes to travel to France, as soon as next summer. Down the road, she wants to visit countries like Portugal and Italy, other pockets of the world where she’s discovered long-lost family connections. And she still hopes to learn more about her father’s side of the family, potentially via DNA-testing services like 23andMe.
As for responding to that question about what she “is” from nagging strangers, Eve-Lyn says she’s more assured now that she has a concrete idea about her family history. “Knowing the legacy some of my ancestors left behind… it gives me more confidence on who I am. When people ask me those questions now, and they want to know who I am and where we come from – I know. I can answer. I don’t feel lost.”
She also says that knowing more about her ancestry has changed the way she moves through the world in general. “It’s made me look at things with a different perspective. Right now, everybody is so divided… it’s an ‘us’ against ‘them’ kind of mentality. It’s kind of impossible for me to think that way now, because if people weren’t open and accepting of different views, cultures and races, I wouldn’t exist,” she explains. “I can name six or seven different countries my family comes from. Pretty much everyone down the line is mixed. It’s made me more culturally accepting.”
It’s a lesson she thinks more people could stand to learn in today’s politically charged climate. “I think it would definitely be beneficial for more people to look into this stuff,” she says. “Chances are, you’re going to find something you weren’t expecting. You’re going to find ties to cultures you might have prejudices against or that you might think stereotypical things about, but if you end up looking back and finding out you could be a descendant of someone from a totally different culture, it makes you more open.”