Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

Maud Newtons ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mothers father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mothers grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Mauds maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Mauds father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the purity of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Mauds mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the familys living room where she performed exorcisms.

Her parents divorce, when it came, was a relief.Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton inspired an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogyher grandfathers marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors roles in slavery and genocideand sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernitys dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.

Searching, moving, and inspiring,Ancestor Troubleis one writers attempt to use genealogya once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industryto expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

Hardcover, Mar 29th 2022