"Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother's father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother's grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Newton's maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton's father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the 'purity' of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War ... Her parents' divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage ... As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Newton researched her genealogy--her grandfather's marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors' roles in slavery and genocide--and sought family secrets in her DNA. But immersed 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 ... Ancestor Trouble is one writer's attempt to use genealogy ... to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us"--Dust jacket flap.
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