I’m glad I read this book. Using her own family’s history and her experience researching that history, Maud Newton explores what it means to be descended from other human beings. She goes into detail about how things work like genealogy and DNA testing and the ethical concerns that come with it. 

She grapples with being a white person on colonized land and descending from people who actively contributed to colonization and genocide and enslaved other people- I wish that the book had dedicated more time to talking about how to live with that truth and reparations but it also talked about those topics more than I feared it would when I started. 

Lastly, she goes into the spiritual side of looking into our ancestors from a refreshingly balanced perspective of someone with religious Christian trauma, fear of appropriation, and also openness to the unknown. 

I also think this last section could have been a whole book on its own and I would read a sequel if she delved further into either topics (this or the reparations).