Categories: Genealogy, History, Identity, Language, Migrations, Slavery

Sometime early last year, I indulged in the DNA genealogy craze a second time, and purchased a saliva-based DNA analysis from 23andme. It took roughly 2 months to receive my results and, I must admit, I was a bit impatient. Impatient? How come? 

In 2011, I called myself being “smart” by trying to avoid US-based DNA analysis companies, because I knew what their “deal” was all about and how they intentionally duped consumers. I stumbled upon AncestryByDNA, based in the UK, and thought: finally a company whose database, harvest locations, and goals were different from that of the US-based companies. When I received the test kit in the mail, and then read the literature that accompanied my results a couple of months later, I learned that in that case, I was duped, too; although the company is based in the UK, its saliva samples were (at least, at that time) all sent to the US for analysis to be compared with living persons who had also sent in their saliva to various companies in the US being served by one lab. Back to square one. In any case, I later learned of the outdated DNA technologies involved in AncestryByDNA’s analyses, and equally learned of the limited “options” and explanations the company provides to its consumers. It simply mailed me a “certificate of ancestry” with a reading of 20% Amerindian, and roughly equal parts of European and African “ancestry.” I rolled my eyes, because I understood how they arrived at such terminology and calculations “of ancestry.” That’s for another post, though.

One “option” lacking in AncestryByDNA’s service, was linking consumers who share mutations or markers in significant or insignificant proportions. But 23andme, a California-based company, mostly interested in proving/disproving the relationship between disease and race, that company does offer that feature; along with other companies. I know lots of folks who tested with 23, and they highly recommended its service. So, I gave in.

The “DNA relatives” it connected me with live on 4 continents and have documentable and memorable roots going in all directions of human migration. That part I expected, as it matched what I know (or think I know) from the extant paper trail on my various paternal and maternal lineages. One of the matches, Idona Clarke, I was not ready for. It did not match my paper trail. And it frustrated me to no end. It still does. She nor I can figure it out. Idona is from St. Kitts. And she matches me on my maternal DNA, i.e. the side with deep Latin Louisiana roots. I thought to myself: St. Kitts is British! That side of my lineage is about as unbritish as they come. I may have stumbled upon clues recently, however.

When I was writing the post on the trajectory of Creole identity in Louisiana, I rediscovered intel I had forgotten. The Quebec-born brothers Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who had been among those who claimed the mouth of the Mississippi for France in 1699, were among the first to own documented slaves in the nascent colony. Jean-Baptiste, more commonly known as Bienville, eventually served as colonial governor 4 times, and played a pivotal role in the development of the gulf coast of the colony, particularly at Biloxi and Fort-Condé-de-la-Mobile, now known as Mobile, Alabama. Although Canadian, Bienville navigated through French America in his lifetime, including to a small Caribbean island–then a French possession–known officially today as St. Christopher or St. Kitts, but then was Saint-Christophe.

In January 1706, departing La Rochelle, France, the French crown ordered Iberville to command a squadron of 12 ships to the French Caribbean island of Martinique. From there, he was instructed to harass the English in the West Indies, particularly on the small island of Neves (Niévès, in French), off of the coast of Saint-Christophe. His brother, Joseph Le Moyne, Sieur de Sérigny, was instructed to deliver supplies from France back to Mobile. Iberville’s first target was Neves, said to be inadequately defended by Englishmen. By the first week of April 1706, Iberville had captured the entire island, imprisoning around 2,000 white women, men and children, and approximately 6,000 slaves. Afterwards, he divided the captured persons and items among officers, and others, then dismembered the crews of the 12 ships. Before making his way back to Mobile, Iberville engaged in additional attacks and “exchanges” of goods in Saint-Domingue and Cuba.[1]

Among those “goods” he brought back to Mobile were a number of slaves. Six slaves in total Iberville gave as a gift to his brother Antoine Le Moyne, Sieur de Châteaugué or Châteauguay, at Mobile. The latter reported hoping for more, but that is what Iberville brought back from the seizure of Niévès. The Nevesian slaves were among the first documented in the small, embryonic colony. All were baptized Roman Catholics and had Catholic given names. The Jacemin family (François and Marie), who I mentioned in a previous post, were undoubtedly among them. After 1706, many more slaves found their way into early colonial Mobile and probably Biloxy. From all evidence, some of those slaves lived pious lives as Roman Catholics, marrying their slave spouses and rearing their children in the Catholic faith. Marie, the concubine of François Jacemin, later married a slave of Iberville named Georges on 26 October 1707. The fact that from the earliest years of slavery in the young colony slaves married, and established homes as stable as can be achieved considering the circumstances, is crucial, as it characterizes French and later Spanish slavery in Louisiana, as historians Kimberly Hangar, Ann Patton Malone, Emily Clark, and many others, point out in their scholarship. My Mobile family were intricately connected with the Le Moyne’s, I even descend from them, and other bourgeois land and slaveowners in early Mobile.[2]

And so, there it is, a connection of my Louisiana Creole family with the island of St. Kitts. Perhaps this is how Idona and I connect. Maybe she descends from the Le Moynes, as I do, but she has no genealogy that far back in time, so cannot confirm. I do, though. Hence, the dilemma. Regardless, Creole culture on the islands of Saint-Christophe and Niévès persisted even after the islands were reclaimed by the British, such that today, without squinting one’s eyes too tightly, one can smell créolité in the islands’ air. A good example is a carnival they celebrate bearing a St. Christophe Creole name: J’ouvert, which, as it turns out, is celebrated on numerous Caribbean islands; many of which we will explore in posts this month on the internationality of créolité. [3] ___________

[1] Min to Sérigny, 25 November 1705, Archives de la Marine (AM), Book (B) 2, page (p) 183, folio (f) 557v; Louisiana State Museum Archives (LSMA), Délibérations du Conseil supérieur (DCS), 1 May 1735; Iberville to min. 10 April 1706; AM, B4, p31, f149-50v; Journal de Maupeou, s.d., AM, b4, p31, f153-55; Iberville to min., 10 April 1706, loc. cit., f149v-151v; L. Guérin, Histoire maritime de France, vol. IV (Paris: 1851-59), 476; Carta de Álvarez de Villarín, 30 May 1706, Archivo general de Indias (AGI), Santo Domingo, legajo (L) 377; Carta de Luis Chacón, 26 May 1706, AGI, Santo Domingo, L377; as found in, Jay Higginbotham, Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711 (University of Alabama Press, 1977), 236-8.

[2] La Vente to [SME Dir.], 27 June 1708, Archives du Séminaire de Québec, Lettres, R32; Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Mobile (DM), Book A, 11 June 1707; LSMA, DCS, 4 June 1735, 1 October 1735; DM, Book A, 26 October 1707, as found in Higginbothom, p 302. For info on stable slave and free people of color families, marriages and baptisms, see Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 38-96; Kimberly S. Hangar, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 89-109; Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Gary B. Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Free People of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 8-127; Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 30.

[3] My connections to the founding families are numerous, but include such families as the Rochon, Preau or Prau, Colon, Barbeau dit Boisdoré, Doussin, Brette or Brest, and Le Moyne or Lemoine.