Writing about my mom’s family, the stories were moving. I wondered, where did the dysfunction start? And I was also looking for positives to carry forward. “I became aware that this generation was disappearing,” she tells me, “and this, combined with family estrangement, propelled my research. When Newton started her blog, Weekend Ancestry, in 2007, her grandparents had all either died or were ill. Newton got interested in researching her father’s family later, determined, she writes, “to root out every secret, lie, and hypocrisy.” But he considered slavery a benevolent institution that should never have been disbanded.” He was, by many metrics, an intelligent man. Of her father, Newton writes, “I have loved my father and I have feared him. She was given to excess.” As examples, Newton points to her mother’s 30 cats and, at one point, hundreds of birds. She founded an evangelical church in our living room and performed exorcisms. “My mother is incredibly charismatic, eccentric, a wonderful storyteller. Her curiosity was rewarded.īorn in Dallas and raised in Miami, Newton had believed both sides of her family had roots in the South, until “my great-grandmother came up as a witch in Puritan New England,” which, Newton tells me, fit in with her mother’s religious fervor. So Newton started researching her mother’s family in 2000, on her lunch hours at a job she had when she was 29. My mom’s comic timing and flair for ironic foreshadowing tempered Granny’s dry wit, her succinct and deadly condemnations.” Also, Newton writes, “the stories were presented as entertainment rather than tragedy.

Ancestor trouble by maud newton