{"id":9652,"date":"2022-04-13T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9652"},"modified":"2022-05-05T08:14:45","modified_gmt":"2022-05-05T12:14:45","slug":"ancestor-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9652","title":{"rendered":"Ancestor Trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Regular readers of this blog know one of my passions is genealogy. My latest adventure? Learning how to customize maps to show my ancestors\u2019 travels across geography as well as time. Not everything I\u2019ve learned about their migrations is happy news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I listened with interest to a recent presentation by the author of the just-published and much-anticipated memoir, Ancestor Trouble<\/a>: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation<\/em> by Maud Newton<\/a>, sponsored by the New England Historic and Genealogical Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t write memoir, but from friends who do, I know that figuring out how<\/em> to tell these stories and how much<\/em> to tell is a big part of the challenge. Newton had wrestled with her family\u2019s difficult past for a long time, and she\u2019s used both genealogy and DNA research to try to sort out fact from fiction. For example, did her paternal grandfather really marry thirteen times? (Newton has found records of 10 of his marriages to nine different women.) Did he really murder a neighbor with a hay hook? (Yes, but it was self-defense, after her grandfather came to the aid of the neighbor\u2019s step-daughter whom the man was assaulting.) And did he die in a mental institution? (Yes, and Newton has put a gravestone on his formerly unmarked grave. It\u2019s inscribed \u201cNot Forgotten.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her family, including her mother, were great Texas storytellers, and Newton had decided that, given everything else she knew about the family and the mental illnesses that plagued many of them across generations, many of her family stories seemed improbable but not unlikely. On her mother\u2019s side, the family was very poor, yet in the early 1800s, they did own slaves. Even a Massachusetts ancestor, who in the 1600s was tried twice<\/em> for being a witch and exonerated both times, may have owned a slave, slavery being not as unknown in New England as generally believed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The details and corroboration of these and many other stories were a lot for family members to bring on board. Not only was the research difficult, the bigger challenge was for the family to come to the reconciliation Newton alludes to in the book\u2019s title. Unfortunately, some family members\u2019 approach to the past is to \u201csweep it under the rug.\u201d That\u2019s a loss in a much greater sense, because, as Newton says, \u201cwithout each of the people who came before, who contributed to the genes that ultimately contributed to ours, we wouldn\u2019t exist as we do now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regular readers of this blog know one of my passions is genealogy. My latest adventure? Learning how to customize maps to show my ancestors\u2019 travels across geography as well as time. Not everything I\u2019ve learned about their migrations is happy … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Finding the secrets in a difficult past, in order to understand one's present.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[265,41,118,60,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-genealogy","category-memoir","category-storytelling","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2vG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9654,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9652\/revisions\/9654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}