I appreciate what Maud Newton is trying to do with Ancestor Trouble. That’s why I picked it up: I too am interested in our connection with our departed ancestors, what descending from flawed but human people can teach us about our heritage and our spirit. It didn’t end up being quite the book I wished it was, but it was entertaining enough, and had some kernels of thought in the Spirituality section I’d like to explore more.

Newton is lucky her family has some interesting characters, because over half of this book chronicles the lives of her own relatives, from her grandparents back to her ancestors in colonial New England. She clearly went deep into her own family genealogy – I liked the citations at the back of both historical records and her own emails with family members – and was able to dig up some intriguing facts. Not all of them were winners, though: some of the stories should probably have stayed in the family legend category. I also found that the stories of her ancestors got jumbled throughout the book, and I kept having to refer back to previous chapters to remember which great-grandfather we were talking about.

However interesting these stories were to the reader, I’m sure they were more meaningful to Newton. She wants to see herself in, or distance herself from, everything she learns about her ancestors. This is much of the premise of the book, and the reflections on how she could be made up of these people who came before her make this book more than just a retelling of family history.

Newton weaves together what she learns about her family with what she learns about genealogy, genetics, culture, and spirituality. For the most part, this works decently well. She keeps the fact-based sections short, just long enough to tie into her wider themes, but still informative. I especially enjoyed her explorations of ancestral healing and her unselfconsciousness about jumping into the woo stuff.

Newton being a white woman in the American South, I can understand her fixation on uncovering her familial culpability in slavery and racism. She spends a lot of time detailing just how racist her father is (to be fair, the answer is very), and the last few chapters seemed to devolve into airing her family’s dirty laundry. This all is explained as setting up her obsession with finding racist flaws in each of her ancestors. I’m not sure if she’s trying to absolve herself through her research, but the phrase “sins of the father” kept jumping to mind as she excoriates her family tree. She even spends some time confessing to her own past racist actions. It’s complicated, for all of us, to reckon with the morality of the past, but it seems that Newton feels she has something to prove, an original sin she inherited from the generations of white settlers who make up her family tree. I suppose that’s why she wrote this book. 

We all have a complex relationship with the people who came before us, who were human as we are, and who did both harm and good. I’m not sure Newton solved this complexity for us, but she gave me some ideas to chew on, and a renewed interest in connecting with my own forebearers.