Ancestor trouble A reckoning and a reconciliation

Review by Booklist Review

"Know thyself," said Socrates, and Newton takes this directive to heart in a memoir that strives to not only understand her specific personality but identify its development through multiple generations of ancestors. This knowledge of her family's colorful history, which includes a grandfather who allegedly married 13 times; a demanding, racist father; and a speaking-in-tongues evangelical mother, raises more questions than it answers. Fortunately, the burgeoning industry of internet ancestry research and accessible DNA testing helps Newton affix missing leaves to her family tree. Yet each new data point reveals further avenues of inquiry, rabbit holes that raise doubts about physical traits, emotional vulnerabilities, and mental strengths. In exploring her own background, Newton investigates current theories regarding DNA analysis, inherited trauma, and psychological profiling with Sherlockian verve and an academician's tenacity. Genealogy sleuths often undertake such quests hoping to discover hidden gems buried deep in those census records, such as a direct link to aristocracy or a Founding Father. Newton is just looking for some peace of mind, and her approach may help others realize what a worthy goal that is.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Newton debuts with a masterful mix of memoir and cultural criticism that wrestles with America's ancestry through her own family's complex past. While it's often "cast as a narcissistic Western peculiarity," she argues that "ancestor hunger circles the globe" as people have increasingly begun to search for "a deeper sense of community, less 'I' and more 'we.' " Newton, though, was raised on fanciful stories of her relatives--including a grandfather with 13 ex-wives, and her great-aunt Maude (the inspiration behind Newton's writing pseudonym), who died young in an institution--and tales of murder, witchcraft, and spiritual superstition, all of which she interrogates here with a shrewd eye. As she "search backward" through her family's history in an effort to find redemption and healing, she contextualizes their stories within the nation's history of white supremacy and religious fundamentalism (her mother was a fervent evangelical who believed their "forebears had sinned in such a way as to open the door to a generational curse"). Most affecting is her rendering of her complicated relationship with her father and his own "racist bloodline," likening her existence to "a kind of homegrown eugenics project." The result is a transfixing meditation on the inextricable ways the past informs the present. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Mar.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

How deep do genetic roots penetrate into an individual's day-to-day life? To answer this question, Newton's debut memoir intermingles her own history and her extensive research in ancestry and genealogy, in a quest to uncover her ancestral path with an eye towards changing the family narrative. She grapples with the somber side of her roots in the Deep South of the United States, including a cycle of traumatic relationships that stubbornly repeats itself against the odds. Newton's study of the histories of genealogy and genetic testing views these tools through a critical lens to reveal how they have been used to maintain a white-supremacist status quo, even as they can also be genuinely helpful for discovering one's background. Newton references recent literature, including works by Morgan Jenkins and Alexander Chee, in her attempt to uncover the different ways in which humans relate to family and historical records, and to answer the question of what our ancestry says about us. VERDICT An engaging and thoroughly researched memoir relaying a family history that is at turns recognizable and abhorrent, as an honest and typical history of American exceptionalism, racism, and misogyny. Will appealing to lovers of memoirs, family secrets, genealogy, and the sociological makeup threading U.S. history.--Kelly Karst

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The current wave of interest in genealogy, heredity, family history, and responsibility for past injustices crescendos in a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting. "Ancestor hunger circles the globe" and "spans millennia," writes blogger, critic, and essayist Newton in her first book. Perhaps her hunger is especially gnawing due to her long-term estrangement from her proudly racist father--and from her holy roller mother for a time, as well. These ruptures seeded a project that grew like a fairy-tale beanstalk, which the author climbs with unflagging energy. She begins with a few burning questions: "Had my mom's father really married thirteen times? Had his father really killed a man with a hay hook?" Then she used Ancestry.com, 23andMe, and many other resources to track down the truth about her family history, which is rife with scoundrels, slave owners, and a 17th-century accused witch. Newton also carefully presents the problems with the accuracy and ethics of these tools. She is particularly interested in intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and the possibility of inheriting mental illness, and she identifies "patterns across generations that seem nearly supernatural in their virulence." In addition to historical and scientific information, as well as summaries of many relevant books, the author delivers numerous vivid recollections of her childhood and strained family dynamics. "Strangers confided to my mom in parking lots, laughed at her stories in checkout lines, sympathized with her grumbling in waiting rooms," writes Newton. "She was fun, charming, and, so it seemed to me then, indomitable. And yet she'd chosen to tie herself to someone like my dad, who has never to my knowledge charmed anyone." In a rather surprising chapter, the author describes her experiences contacting dead ancestors at an "ancestral lineage healing intensive" and details her ginger approach to cross-cultural practices of ancestor reverence, always conscious of "all the pain I knew my ancestors had caused, outside and inside our family." Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 A Doorway Over time the simplest facts of human existence have become to me the most unfathomable. We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers' fathers. We begin with the sperm of one human being and the egg of another, and then we enter the world and become ourselves. Beyond all that's encoded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes--our hair, eyes, and skin of a certain shade, our frame and stature, our sensitivity to bitter tastes--we are bundles of opinions and ambitions, of shortcomings and talents. Every one of our forebears had hopes and fears, good days and bad. All of them took actions, and were forced into situations, that shaped them and that led to us. Each person on earth is a particular individual consisting of parts from other particular individuals. The alchemy between our genes and our individuality is a mystery we keep trying to solve. In the West, many of us look to science and genetics for answers to these existential questions we'll only ever answer in part. Why are some of us beautiful and some of us plain, some athletic and some clumsy, some depressive and some optimistic? How much can investigating our genes answer these questions, and what do our efforts to decode our destinies in this way say about us? In terms of DNA, we are no more related to most of our ancestors than we are to the people around us on a train or at a baseball game. And yet without each of the people who came before, who contributed to the genes that ultimately contributed to ours, we wouldn't exist as we do now. Even as I focus on the biological family in this book, I don't idealize it. I have a complicated relationship with some of my family members and no contact with my father. I also have a blended family. My stepdaughter, my only child, is one of the most important people in my life. My sister's wonderful kids were adopted into my family. My stepfather and stepsister have both had a profound influence on me. And then there are my twin half-siblings, two of my closest biological relatives. They're my father's children, born thirty-nine years after me. I may never have the chance to know them. I share more interests and beliefs with my friends and in-laws than with many people whose genetics overlap with mine. I realize that families need not be bound by blood and also that having a blood relationship is no guarantee of affinity. Still, the influence of our genes, our ancestors, on the people we are is undeniable. All we have to do is look in the mirror to see that. Wondering what this inheritance means for us doesn't mean we're devaluing other important family relationships--or imbuing our ancestors, or their beliefs or practices, with an assumption of supremacy. Many of us trace our ancestors on genealogy sites that are increasingly entangled with genetic testing. But after booming for a decade, the market for consumer DNA tests seems to be bottoming out. The reduced demand has generated theories. Potential testers may be concerned about privacy; or the tests, which a user takes only once, may already have reached most interested consumers. But there's been another shift in the culture, especially among young people: a recognition that the pull toward our ancestors is at least as rooted in spiritual yearning as it is in a desire to unearth empirical fact. Ancestor hunger circles the globe. It spans millennia. It's often been cast as a narcissistic Western peculiarity. Historically, though, it's far more usual for people to seek connection with their forebears than not to seek it. Even now, in many parts of the world, spiritual practices involving ancestors flourish. Rather than promoting self-absorption, they tend to foster a deeper sense of community, less "I" and more "we." These traditions sound alien to many of European ancestry because we don't know our own history. True, many of the records have vanished. Accounts that survive are often muddled and contentious. But in the ancient world, the separation between the living family and the dead was not nearly as stark as many of us in the West perceive it to be. Rituals in ancient Greece and Rome were intended to bring peace to family dead in the afterlife. Ancestors shown proper reverence were spiritual allies to the living family, whereas neglected dead could wreak enormous harm. Across the ancient world, families in many cultures also venerated household gods that represented or were handed down by ancestors. (Even in the Bible, Rachel steals her father's teraphim, usually agreed to be household gods.) Ancestral practices endured in fragmented form in parts of the Christianized West until the Protestant Reformation. Vestiges survive in Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and the other liturgical churches, with God as the intermediary. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints baptize their family dead by proxy. In many parts of the world, direct spiritual connections between people and their ancestors never stopped being cultivated. To name examples is to omit far too many others, but from Korea, Japan, and China to Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, from Mexico to Peru, ancient traditions of reverence endure. In Cuba and Haiti, in pockets throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, Indigenous and enslaved people preserved ancestor-honoring practices, often syncretizing them with Christianity so the traditions could be carried on even in proximity to the church. In recent years, people whose ancestors lost or were robbed of this spiritual connection to their family dead have begun to reclaim it for themselves, sometimes as a wholly celebratory act, but often as a way of reckoning with family burdens and wrongs as well as the gifts of a lineage. Many people newly drawn to ancestor work see it as vital for cultural repair. It's difficult to heal intergenerational trauma if we don't understand how it began. Modernity promises each of us the opportunity to define our own identity. It gives us the freedom, at least in theory, not to be boxed in by those who've come before us. We're no longer obliged to glorify our ancestors and take on their customs uncritically or to view their lives as destiny, which is all to the good. But in turning away from practices that encoded into familial memory the people who came before us, we've relinquished something enormous. When I first started exploring my own family history, my interest flowed as much from fear as longing. The allure of ancestors had a lot in common with a good ghost story. Now I find myself not merely respecting traditions of ancestor reverence but advocating for them, as a doorway to something vital and sacred, accessible as earth, and natural as breath. Excerpted from Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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