Maud Newton begins her book, Ancestor Trouble, with her search for her own heritage. I read the book that goes on sale March 29 in an advance reading copy furnished by Net Galley. She has heard family tales about the ancestor who married thirteen times and was killed by one of his wives and another who was killed with a hay hook and died in an institution. She begins using genealogy sites to find answers to her wonderings with inconsistent results.
Along with this long term search she brings her own nuclear family, whom she knows, into the picture, adding her family memories in a memoir fashion. Her racist father commends slavery and extols the purity of his own family line back to the Revolutionary War. However, he can’t control her mother who has thirty rescue cats and performs exorcisms in the church she has in the family living room. Her relief at her parents’ divorce and periodic estrangement from both of them only adds to her anxiety about how much of their identity will be passed along to her genetically. So, part of the book becomes the old nature vs. nurture enigma.
Sandwiched into the narrative, she recounts various cultural practices about death and dying. Her take on religious practices comes largely from her fundamentalist mother without much distinction for other types of Christian practice until she is near the end of the book. I found that to be a missing point in her narrative.
One word of warning – Maud mentions several other books and authors in her own book that make you think you must add them to your list. Second word of warning – if you are disturbed by reading things with which you disagree, this is not the book for you. It seems to me that almost everybody will find some argument with her. On the positive side, if you are interested in the old issue of nature versus nurture or genetics and ancestry, you will find much to interest you in the book. You may even come away glad that someone has relatives crazier than yours.