When Newton was 12, her maternal grandmother, a 'fierce' Texan whom she called Granny, told her to guard for signs of mental illness in herself, her sister, and their children.

Newton's genealogical research has been, in part, a way of reckoning with how her father became the kind of man who 'cover the faces of brown children in our storybooks with our mom's nail polish.' She writes, 'The older I get, the more I search backward, as though if I could know everyone who led to my father, who made him who he is, I would know him too.' She found a history of enslaving humans 'in the hundreds, if not thousands' across her paternal family tree.īut it's not just her father's line that causes her anxiety. A white supremacist lawyer from the Mississippi Delta who convinced her mother to marry him 'in a kind of homegrown eugenics project' because he believed their babies would be smart, he was a fearsome, exacting, and overbearing presence in her childhood. Newton begins with her most troubling ancestor: her father, from whom she has been estranged for 20 years. Building from the backbone of her Harper's article, Ancestor Trouble represents decades of research into genealogic records, genetic science, and the cultural history of 'ancestor hunger' and reverence - as well as Newton's own coming to terms with how to face and honor her family history. Newton still hasn't unraveled that mystery, but her vigorous book Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation deepens her investigation of both family lore (her maternal grandfather is rumored to have married 13 times, once to a woman who shot him in the gut) and our broader preoccupation with our forebears. What drove her obsession was the sense that being able to trace her ancestral lines back far enough might hold the answers to the mystery of the interplay between inheritance and individuality: 'If I dug deeply enough, if I scrutinized my findings hard enough and long enough, I might understand why my mother became a preacher and I became a writer and my father was unable to love me in a normal fatherly way.' Census, working backward through history') has sometimes 'felt like a sickness.' In 'America's Ancestry Craze,' her 2014 Harper's cover story on genealogy, genetics, and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from, Maud Newton writes that her research ('whole weekends spent mired in the U.S.

Book ancestor trouble