I came here looking for ghosts...
I Was Never “From” One Place
People always want a place. Where are you from? But my family doesn’t trace in straight lines. We web out — across Port-au-Prince, Paris, Guadeloupe, Brittany, and Naples. We show up in Ellis Island logs. In faded French censuses. In stories told half in French and half in suspicion.
I’m Mark Sky Voltaire. My family is from Haiti. Also France. Also Italy. Also Guadeloupe and maybe Martinique. Some of them crossed the ocean by choice. Some didn’t have one. Some ran. Some married into cultures they never planned to belong to. I’ve been trying to make sense of it all.
My mom, Claire Abgrall, was born in Paris. Her dad, Jean Abgrall, was Breton. Her mom, Monique Drouaire, also French. I didn’t grow up knowing anyone except my grandfather on the Abgrall side, and the same for my grandmother Monique’s Drouaire side, which is part of why I’m writing this. I want to fix that. Sometimes the gaps in your memory feel like they're holding the shape of people you were supposed to know.
Every time I go looking, the story turns back toward Haiti — like all true Caribbean stories do. But not just as a place of birth. Haiti, for my family, is the forge. The transformation chamber. The place where Frenchmen turned to fugitives, Italians became in-laws, and a girl named Vilthelie gave birth to legacy from the soil no one wrote down.
My dad, Karl Voltaire, was born in Port-au-Prince. His father, Michel-Ange Voltaire born before 1920, came from a man named Luigi Schettini and Laure Voltaire. Laure’s parents were Gaston Voltaire and Julia Charles. Michel-Ange’s father—my great-grandfather—was Italian. That’s Luigi. I found records of him and his family through the Ellis Island database. The Schettinis came to the U.S. at some point, so there’s a whole thread of this family that passed through New York — probably never imagining a Haitian great-grandson would be searching for their names a hundred years later.
On the other side of my Haitian family, things get blurry. My grandmother Adrienne Anglade was the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Virgile Anglade and Lucie Victor. I’ve heard stories about Lucie’s parents—Albert Victor and Vilthelie Cypres—but they’re half-formed and hard to pin down. Supposedly Albert was from Martinique, possibly white or mixed-race, and his boat caught fire near Jacmel. People on the coast saved him. That’s how the story goes. He stayed, met Vilthelie, and had a daughter. I’ve never been able to find a record for Vilthelie — a name so soft and quiet it almost disappears when you try to trace it. It’s like she appears for one moment to give life to Lucie… and then vanishes from history.
That story right there—that’s why I do this. Because people like Vilthelie get erased. And I don’t accept that. If the paper trail ends, then I follow oral stories. If the stories dry up, I look at patterns. Migration routes. Naming customs. Land records. Even silence tells you something if you know how to listen.
This isn’t just curiosity. It’s responsibility. I carry their names, even the ones I don’t know yet. They’re my family. People often treat genealogy like a hobby for retirees. For me, it’s survival. It’s identity. It’s a way of telling the world: I wasn’t dropped here out of nowhere. I didn’t come from a void. I came from people. Places. Struggles. Choices. Mistakes. Love stories. Fires. Ships. Soil.
And when I say I came from Haiti, I mean all of it—the revolution, the trauma, the brilliance, the diaspora. I also mean I came from Martinique, maybe. From Naples. From Brittany. From the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. From family dinners where nobody talked about ancestry because they were too busy surviving the present.
I’m writing this chapter because I want my kids to know what I found. I want them to understand that their story didn’t start with them. It didn’t even start with me. It started before the records and will continue after the data stops. And somewhere in that space — between what’s known and what’s forgotten — is the truth we’re here to protect.