ANCESTOR TROUBLE

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.