Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton Get eBook
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Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton
An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family?and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves.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 a mental institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud?s maternal lines, to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud?s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was a book-smart man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the ?purity? of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud?s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church