In late 1760, an island homestead in the middle of Mahone Bay was attacked. The family were wealthy Huguenots – French Protestants not welcomed by either side. Micmac Indians scalped the father and kidnapped his pregnant wife and three small children, trekking them on a forced epic overland to Quebec City where they were sold as a prize to the French.

They were my people, I’m told. One of hundreds of twists of fate either cruel and deliberate or random and blessed that conspired to spit me into the world in 1973.

In 1755, Andreas and Philip, German brothers newly arrived in Lunenburg, heard tales of cattle abandoned and ripe for the taking in the wake of the Acadian expulsion. They up and bushwhacked across the province to Grand-Pré to rescue (or salvage, or steal, depending on your perspective) as many cows as they could. There and back again, racing to beat the winter, the journey took them more than three months. They were here, in Lunenburg, huffing up the steep lanes from the fishing fleets to the churches at the top of the hill. Past the very same bumps and stoops and housefronts that flank our favourite haunts 250 years later.

The lives of our fore-folk are often hollywood-grade, all romance and heroism and double-crossing and tragedy. Such is the case for all of us, if you look (my friend Michael’s great-great-grandfather was a notorious Jamaican pirate, honest-to-god). Even the ordinary ones are magical: the Truro photographer who took such affectionate portraits of his lovely wife in the 1920s. Newton Sponagle, the late-1800s sea captain who sailed the world with his battered wooden chest. It now holds our Halloween costumes, his name hand-etched on the inside.

There was John Robson, my Grampa Joe’s father, posted to lead the honour guard of England’s King Edward VIII during WWII. Tricky Eddie, not only suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer but having abdicated his throne for an American divorcee, was industriously packed off to Bermuda where a Canadian contingent helped him run his conveniently distant governorship. A blessing? Perhaps. John was out of the melee, but far from his beloved wife Katherine.

A few months ago their wartime letters miraculously found their way to us, full of love. How he missed her, their children. Don’t let them get you dearest, he wrote cheerfully. Keep little Don by the scruff of his neck (hey! that’s my Grampa) if he gets rowdy.

What will someone find of us, tucked in an attic?

Family trees are never real, never evocative. Not like holding the artifacts of a life in your hand, crumbly or fragile or mossy as they are. Like finding a packet of forgotten love letters embalmed in a moldy purse, stuck in the rafters of a stranger’s horse barn. This is when your history brushes up against you, seeps through your skin like a ghost that leaves finger smudges. I was here. I was alive. I struggled and fought and risked. Loved and birthed and laughed and protected, just like you. This was mine: this, right here. This thing, this place.

Thick with many generations of Nova Scotians on one side, longtime New Brunswickers on the other. No wonder Evan likes the taste of seawater.