Wide learning and roving speculation distinguish “Ancestor Trouble.” From Pythagoras to Mendel, Newton moves this way and that, exploring over two millennia of genetic speculation and experimentation before the breakthrough of human genome mapping in 2000. Going further down the rabbit hole, Newton’s ninth great-grandmother, a self-reliant 17th century Puritan, was charged by Boston patriarchs with “ into familiarity with the Devil.”
A great-grandfather killed a close friend with a “hay hook” and ended his days in a “mental institution.” (Newton locates his unmarked grave and arranges for a headstone.)Ī glamorous great-aunt paraded down the street naked and, later, “pulled a knife on her mother in the bathtub.” She died in the North Texas Lunatic Asylum. Newton’s maternal grandfather was a Dallas dress cutter who was overly fond of alcohol one of his 13 wives shot him in the gut, perhaps a little high of the mark. (The book has a wonderful family album identifying many of the players.) Subsequently, “Ancestor Trouble” becomes a vast, captivating melodrama spanning centuries and stuffed with character sketches that are tragic and stupefying. So begins Newton’s two-decade quest, using the genealogy websites 23andMe and, plus extensive archival research, to build her contorted family tree. Newton understood the physical characteristics she shared with her relatives, e.g., her cherished Granny’s bad posture, or “hunch.” But, she wondered, “Beyond environment, were all of us who came from this tangle of acrimony and mental illness - also struggling against something innate?” Was there, as Granny said, something “hiding in my blood”? In moments of self-awareness, she began to consider the possibility of behavioral continuities within her lineage, which had always been veiled in secrecy.
She concedes that, at the time, she was prone to “barn-burner rages” as a by-product of her dysfunctional upbringing. Newton, who knew nothing of this 1969 episode because it happened before she was born - threatened to hurl herself out of a window during college over a spat with a boyfriend.
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