Remembering Our Ancestors: An Interview With My Aunt Frances Cuevas

For my aunt Frances Cuevas, justice is the most powerful force in the world. She works full-time as the Director of Investigations and Trials for the NYC Department of Probation to maintain integrity in legal proceedings.

Frances also has a highly intensive hobby that takes up most of her free time: genealogy. She is committed to figuring out her (and my!) family’s Louisiana Creole heritage, an identity that formed over centuries and incorporates Native American, Black, and European ancestry and customs. Louisiana Creole is a cultural heritage that’s not often recognized or understood in America and is highly debated, even within my own family. As an adolescent, I have become increasingly interested in figuring out my family’s “Creoleness.”

As someone who struggled in their youth to understand and connect with my familial background, I looked to my aunt Frances, who has collected extensive family records reaching back to the 18th century, to help show me the complexities of our family’s ancestry. 

Frances wrote a book containing a comprehensive breakdown of our family tree and found some incredible connections, like our ancestral grandfather being the chief of Louisiana’s Tensas tribe, an ancestral aunt leading a civil rights protest against the one-drop rule, and our ancestors being cheated out of a grand estate due to an unjust law. Frances is now writing a second book specifically focusing on the Native American part of our heritage.

I spoke to Frances in July and, in our conversation I had the opportunity to pick her brain and learn about her background and the inspiration behind her “hobby.” 

As I read her research, I felt enthralled by the drama, power, and personality exhibited in our history. Hearing my Aunt’s stories about my relatives made me feel proud of my family and more confident in my connection with my Creole identity. The people behind our history should never be forgotten, and by highlighting my aunt’s work I, too, hope to honor my family and our legacy.

You have a prolific background in law. How did this other work in ancestry and genealogy begin?

As a prosecutor, a few years after I graduated from law school, I got promoted to the trial unit and got to do big crimes that you would see on television. It was crazy stuff, and it was hard. I’m trying to do justice, but I also see that other people abuse it, and I’m about to put somebody in jail for a long time. So I lost a lot of sleep trying to make sure I was doing the right thing, and there was a point where I started dreaming about other people’s lives. And it wasn’t about me.

You were so focused on other people you forgot yourself?

Yeah, this job was consuming my identity even. And that’s when I decided I needed to do something for myself. So, I started working on the ancestry book. It was my me time, my self-care. 

Also since you’ve been working in law for so long, those skills must be helpful for doing this type of research and analysis. How does that background benefit you? 

It is so important. Reading through documents and recognizing cases and analyzing them gave me the skills to  consider legal actions to get state recognition for the Tensas tribe for our ancestors [Our family members are descendants of the defunct Tensas (Taensa) tribe, which is not state or federally recognized]. And it was crazy, I would be researching case law, and now I was also researching this.

So you were researching documents in the same way, but for your family history instead of for court?

Exactly. But instead of preparing a court case, I was conducting research for a family history book. I made about five different versions, but people weren’t excited about them because it was just a bunch of names on a page. That’s when I decided I wanted to make this book come alive. I wanted people to look at it and want to know about these people. They all lived full lives and now nobody knows them. 

That reminded me of reading Dante in college. He said that in purgatory, people get elevated to Heaven the more people think about them, talk about them, and say something positive about them. And I thought that was a beautiful concept. So, when people go, you have to pass on those stories. If not, then it’s as if they never existed.

Have you ever seen the movie Coco? It’s a similar concept but for children about the idea of honoring the dead. Once everyone forgets about them, they disappear.

Oh yes, it’s that same idea. The stories in the books are a testimony to them. And it gives context to the big questions: What is life about? What did people go through and what have they been able to do?

How did your interest in genealogy evolve?

I started using some of the skills I was learning to find out even more about the family. Like, when did Creole come to mean Black? The first definition of Creole meant you were the child of a French person who came to America. And then, all of a sudden, Creoles are Black people or light-skinned Black people. How did that happen? 

But, along the way, I started seeing their stories. If all you know is a person lived and died at some time, it doesn’t say much. But then you find stories about their gambling, getting into a fight, or a motorcycle accident, and you’re like, “Wait, he drove a motorcycle?!” That’s when it gets interesting. 

So then I started looking up case law because I was interested in how the Tensas were swindled out of their land. [law based on precedents created by past judicial decisions resolved by courts in previous cases]. I just kept going deeper into the research, using the skills I learned in the law.

So, your process is not, “I’m gonna sit down and think about just the ancestry.” It’s you taking your life and then applying it to this study?

Exactly. I discovered a story about a family member who was like a Rosa Parks of her time. And I thought, “How amazing is this? Who knew?” Then I wondered if I could find the actual court case, and I did. Then I had to figure out how to write about it. I have it preserved, but I had to find ways to make it exciting for people who don’t get as excited as I do. Nobody wants to hear my long-winded information. But when I write it creatively, people are interested.

Was there a specific thing that sparked being like “I’m gonna start working, I’m gonna do genealogy work?”

Since I was a kid, I was always hearing stories from Mama about her grandfather who carried a shotgun till the day he died. About how he owned all this land but it was taken from him. Then I found out they leveled the house he lived in, just erased it. So, why are people in power doing these things? What am I about to uncover? This is Louisiana backwoods. Nobody should care about this place. Yet, many Creole families, sometimes including our own, are serious about guarding secrets. It just begs me to investigate. 

How is that process; making the connections and looking at the records? How do you go through that?

It’s a little bit crazy. Most of the time I start with the documents from archives in Louisiana. For example, right now I’m trying to find a death certificate for my great-grandfather. I look at census records, at the register of death certificates, for anybody with a similar name in the same area. And I’ve sometimes bought all those death certificates just to compare them. 

I also have a calculator at times, and I have to review dates of birth to make sure that the age of the children matches the age of the person and vice versa. 

And there’s also talking to people. I talked to Mama a lot. I also spoke to Mama Shirley [Frances’ aunt on her mother’s side] because she told me the stories my mother would not. I even called Uncle Leroy [Frances’ uncle on her mother’s side]. I got him to tell me about  family members he remembered. So it’s a little bit of everything—documented records plus the stories.

What do you think the legacy of our family is? How do you think your work is embracing or possibly changing our ancestral legacy?

As a kid I knew that my grandmother was smart and wanted to write, but she couldn’t go to school. Her stories just made me want to accept the bare minimum. 

But now, with this work, if my son finds out that his ancestral grandfather spoke French, Spanish, and at least two different Native American languages and was a chief who negotiated at the highest levels of government—who will he become? You know, I’m doing this for me because it fascinates me, but I also hope it will impact other people later. 

That these people lived full lives and had such incredible accomplishments, how has that affected you? 

I’m continuing a legacy. I have certain moral obligations or codes that I’m trying to live up to because a lot of our history was about being disenfranchised and knowing we had more to give, but people weren’t willing to give us recognition. And so for me, it’s about trying to learn from them and empower our future. 

If you don’t know where you come from and don’t really understand that path, you can’t see the commonalities and assurance you already have inside. So it’s a nice way to learn more about who you are, because in some kind of weird way, even though the stories are not being passed down, the personalities are being passed down, and it’s nice to recognize and understand that.

It’s the DNA, it lives through all of us and you have to honor it. I hope I can help our descendants say, “You know what? If they could do it, I could do it.”

How do you hope this work can impact the knowledge surrounding the Creole community in Louisiana or the nation as a whole?

I think some people want to shape Creole identity and Creole ancestry into what they want it to be [many people write Creole off as just Black, while others try to equate Creoles to Cajuns, despite their cultural and ancestral differences], as opposed to honoring it as what it was and looking at it in a way that isn’t always sugar-coated. 

Creoles did their own thing. They figured it out in certain ways and got it wrong in others. I’m happy about the emergence of things like Beyoncé and being able to say the word Creole and people understand what that is, but, it’s still weird to me that there’s this huge aspect of American culture, Louisianian culture, that gets erased.  

So creating Creoleness and talking about our heritage is a big, important topic. I want to be that link.