Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton | 2022 | Random House | Hardcover $28.99
Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Maud researched her genealogy — her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide – and sought family secrets through her DNA. But sunk 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 modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.
Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy – a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry — to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors has for all of us.
Disclosure statement: I received a physical ARC of this book from the author — plus some really fantastic tea from Yaupon Brothers! — via a giveaway hosted on the titular newsletter, Ancestor Trouble.
Besides being totally stoked about that fancy tea, I entered the giveaway for this book because I was extremely interested in the premise. I do genealogy as a hobby, and I enjoy reading both well-researched biographies and stories about family history research adventures. Combine that with timely analysis of the impact of our ancestors’ lives on both our personal experiences and on modern society more broadly — RIGHT. UP. MY. ALLEY.
This book is a kind of family history viewed from the lens of cultural history, or perhaps a cultural history viewed from the lens of family history. Maud Newton interweaves stories of her own experiences and genealogical discoveries with discussions of the evolution of genealogy as a field of study and the more recent applications of genetic data both within and beyond heredity-focused studies.
I believe the author was brave to share some of the more intimate details of her own life and the lives of some of her ancestors. It takes guts to be that open about traumatic or damaging or even just embarrassing things, which I really respect. Maud Newton’s recent exploration of various ancestor veneration practices may have encouraged this form of candor.
Sometimes, in doing genealogy, sharing one’s findings requires trying to find a balance between complete honesty and consideration of the audience-family’s potentially tricky feelings; finding a kind of full-but-respectful transparency is the difficult ideal. As a descendant of colonizers and slaveholders and a few people who were problematic in more individual ways, I was particularly interested in reading about the author’s own experience of honestly grappling with that kind of fraught family history.
I appreciate that the author chose to reference both historical and recent scholarly works on the topics of epigenetics, the heredity of mental illness, and the concept of heredity in general. I particularly appreciate that she interviewed a researcher with whom she ultimately disagrees, on the topic of the ethical implications of a particular use of DNA. Although Maud Newton makes clear her own concerns about the impacts of commercial or judicial applications of ostensibly genealogy-focused genetic testing (& I share some of those concerns), she has made an effort to fairly explain the current landscape of consumer-driven DNA, and its cultural, legal, and scientific aspects — without getting too far into the weeds.
I would recommend this book to folks who are interested in family history generally or who often think about the experiences of their ancestors, whether really into pedigree-detail genealogy or just more generally intrigued. It’s also worth a read for people who want to learn a little more about heredity, genetics, and related topics from a personal perspective.
Links:
- Ancestor Trouble newsletter by Maud Newton on Substack
- Official website of Maud Newton
- “America’s Ancestry Craze” article in Harper’s Magazine
- “Maud Newton Confronts Her Past” article in Publishers Weekly
Publication information: Newton, Maud. Ancestor trouble: A reckoning and a reconciliation. New York, NY: Random House, 2022. Advanced copy.
Source: ARC provided by author, via giveaway.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.