Lost Acadian

DNA tells the story: A screen grab from Ancestry.com showing where my ancestors lived in the 1700s

On a consulting assignment in New Brunswick, Canada, in a conversation over dinner with my new clients, I made an offhand comment about a French-Canadian great-grandmother and how some of my ancestors migrated from Canada to Louisiana. “Your ancestors must have been driven out during the Acadian Expulsion,” they said. “That means you have Acadian blood!"

That conversation led to hours spent researching my ancestry and the discovery that my people were indeed among among the earliest settlers in Port Royal, in modern-day Nova Scotia, tracing back to a sea captain named Pierre Arsenault who is believed to have sailed from France in about 1671. 
 
My father glorified our Irish heritage, claiming that we were descended from the Irish King O’Laoghaire (“O’Leary”). I do love Ireland and recall, during my first visit there, feeling gobsmacked by déjà vu when I came upon a vista of horses grazing in a green field against a wild sea. These days, however, after nearly four years of regular travel to New Brunswick, I think of myself as a Lost Acadian, who found her way to Maritime Canada by pure dumb luck. 

Or was it?
 
We are bound to our ancestors by delicate strands of DNA. Might DNA also explain why I fell in love with the French language at the age of 12? Why, when I was planning my first trip to Europe, it had to be France? Or how I ended up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, working a project led by a woman with the last name Arsenault—my newly discovered distant cousin? 
 
Is there something in our DNA that pulls us toward the stories and places of our ancestors?