How I Got Here

How I Got Here: A Memoir tells about her upbringing in Guatemala and Rome

and then as a young adult in America. As a result of her upbringing, upon meeting

someone new, she invariably says, "I wasn't raised here"--"here" meaning America.

But she has also discovered that her first ancestors on her mother's side were among

the Scottish prisoners of war transported to Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1654; the

first Lucas to America was a Quaker who sailed to Philadelphia in 1679. The stories of

her ancestors--from Scottish prisoners to slaveholders and beyond--have become her

stories and are central to her genealogical memoir. Those stories help explain, in the

broadest sense, how she got here.