Ancestor Trouble Quotes

“For those of us who do feel driven to explore our ancestry, compiling a family tree is often about rediscovering something that's been lost. The tools for approaching ruptures in families are new, but the ruptures themselves are not. Ancient literature is filled with lost ancestors and wayward children, with shunnings and estrangement's and gerrymandered lineages.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Humans have always struggled with the idea that our ancestors might determine our destiny, that they could bless us by passing along longevity or sex appeal or doom us with dementia, baldness, or gout. Over the past century, we've often thought in terms of genes versus environment. We've sought to know what our parents transmit through the raw material that produces us and what comes from the way we're raised. The either-or view of nature and nurture may be giving way to a more nuanced view, in some ways an older view. The hope and anxiety are timeless.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Humans across the West long for connection but have never been more polarized or fearful. We face many dangers, including the possibility of extinction because some of us have insisted, over generations, on seeing ourselves as separate from the earth and the rest of our nonhuman kin.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“In the eighteenth century, the mother's imagination became the default explanation for unwanted traits. Her uncanny influence extended to breastfeeding, by which she infused the child with "her ideas, beliefs, intelligence, intellect, diet and speech," along with "her other physical and emotional qualities." This mystical conception of maternity made the mother an easy target for perceived defects in the baby. It was also a reason to be suspicious of her curiosity and passions and to curtail her exposure to the world.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Most ancient thinkers ascribed great influence to the stars. Many also emphasized climate, landscape, diet, and so forth. The Hippocratics taught that these factors affected the balance of four basic fluids, or humors, in the body and that the humors in turn determined the wellness - or sickness - of a person, as well as the kind of child they were likely to have. Hippocrates's son-in-law, Polybus, associates each humor with a season: blood with spring, yellow bile with summer, black bile with fall, and phlegm with winter. He characterizes health as a state in which these humors "are in the correct proportion to each other" and pain and disease as a result of an imbalance.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Ideas about transmission of traits between the generations have shifted over the ages. Biological inheritance is a surprisingly recent concept. The word "gene" came into existence only in 1909. Until about two hundred years ago, Western thinking on the matter rested on ancient theories that are largely unknown to us. Those ideas are part of the bedrock of Western philosophy, intertwined with the development of science, inextricable from our history and in some ways from our thinking even now. Much of the source material has been lost. Authorship of what remains is frequently uncertain. Even contemporaneous secondhand accounts can be contradictory. And, of course, most of what humans have thought about reproduction in their time on the planet was never recorded.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“She advocates studying the relationship between cognition and “those aspects of extended inheritance that lie between genetic and cultural inheritance, the still gray area of epigenetic and behavioral inheritance systems.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“The allure of ancestors had a lot in common with a good ghost story. Now I find myself not merely respecting traditions of ancestor reverence but advocating for them, as a doorway to something vital and sacred, accessible as earth, and natural as breath. Chapter 2 NOT FORGOTTEN Growing up, I associated genealogy with the begats of the Bible, with that old family tree my father showed me, and with his reverence for the Old South. I aspired then to be as little like him and his branch of my family as possible. So I never expected to become interested in compiling my own family tree. When I did start researching my ancestors, slowly at first, and then in”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“In hindsight, this night must have been when I knew for certain I didn't believe in the Christian God, who always seemed to align with my mom and justify her desires. Demons had a way of showing up, as she told it, to underscore the wickedness or folly of whatever she didn't like. Like my Puritan forebears—and their Puritan enemies—she was certain that God took her side. Religion was a shield and a weapon. If someone had to suffer, it was not the believer.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“White women in the Jim Crow era reinforced segregation and class boundaries as zealously as the men did, and sometimes more so, in an extension of their earlier role as enslavers. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers contends in They Were Her Property that before the Civil War, white women may even have been more invested in slavery in some ways than white men were. While most of the woman's property came under her husband’s control at marriage, she could use legal loopholes to maintain control over the people she enslaved. By taking someone else’s freedom, the woman secured more for herself.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Spending time with my ancestors is exciting and scary, joyful and sad, expansive to the edges of the universe and confining as the pain in my jaw. Grappling with their legacies is something I know I will never do perfectly. Making this reckoning as explicit as possible releases me from the idea that I will ever be free of this history. My understanding of the power of all our ancestors for each of us and all of us will continue to take shape in me as long as there is breath in my body.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Historically, the connection between humans and the land was obvious. People were of the land, nourished by it and buried in it, and thus nourished it in return. The earth was kin. The last couple of decades in the West have seen a growing desire to embrace the inevitability of rejoining the land when our time comes. This death-positivity movement brings hope that we can find a better way of returning to the earth. But so far, even in some green cemeteries, human bodies are a problem. Modern corpses don't decay as quickly as they would have historically. Decades pass, and when new bodies are added, the old ones are as preserved as if they were mummified. No one is entirely sure why. Is it the preservatives in our food? The depletion and degradation of the land over centuries?”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Cultures have different standards of beauty, but research suggests that some aesthetic preferences are shared by most people. Humans tend to like symmetry. While Moalem emphasizes our power to influence our own gene expression, he also has a determinist streak, arguing that our faces and "the genetic workmanship that went into our fetal development" are closely linked. Humans evolved to find certain facial traits desirable, he argues, because they "provided the fastest way of assessing, ranking, and relating to the people around us" and they "divulge our developmental and genetic history. Your face can also tell us a lot about your brain.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Twentieth-century proponents of eugenics advanced it as a remedy for a wide variety of perceived heritable shortcomings, including lack of intelligence, as defined by the eugenicists themselves. These impulses are very much with us now.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“AncestryDNA is a different beast, an outgrowth of Ancestry.com's vast genealogical resources. Historically, in contrast to 23andMe's customers, many of whom were interested in medical data, AncestryDNA users signed up specifically for the purpose of researching their family lines. The site blends its genealogical resources with test results. When users are a predicted cousin match, AncestryDNA compares their trees to see if it can automatically pinpoint their common ancestors. Unlike 23andMe, AncestryDNA doesn't let users see precisely where their chromosomes overlap with predicted relatives. No actual genetic data is available to subscribers who match. But its "Thrulineis" feature looks at data even in locked trees or trees that aren't linked to users' DNA tests. While I'm selfishly glad to have that information, I worry for those of the site's 18 million users who don't realize how much of their family connections the site reveals.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“On 23andMe, users can download and compare maps of their chromosomes to see precisely where on a given chromosome they match with someone. If clusters of predicted relatives connect on the same segment, this knowledge can help pinpoint common ancestors. In this way, 23andMe far surpasses the other consumer genetics sites in access to genetic information. Overall, though, its weaknesses as a genealogical tool are significant. The site offers little family-tree functionality, making it difficult to figure out how the genetics connect to the people.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Parabon became embroiled in controversy when the media reported that the sleuths who identified the Golden State Killer used data from GEDmatch, a free genealogy site to which I'd once uploaded my data at Moore's suggestion. They didn't inform users before doing so. Moore told MIT Technology Review that she viewed the Golden State Killer case as a "green light" to proceed with research in GEDmatch. Amid all the publicity, she reportedly reasoned, anyone who objected could delete their data. I deleted mine (though my genetic data is in the hands of law enforcement anyway through a research study.) In 2019, GEDmatch changed its policy, protecting users' genomic data from being used to solve crimes unless the user opts in.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“I came into being through a kind of homegrown eugenics project. My parents married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

“Birds of a feather flock together," he was fond of saying. He said it at the breakfast table; he said it on the way to the pool; he said it while covering the faces of brown children in our storybooks with our mom's nail polish. Sometimes he closed the pages before the paint dried so that they stuck together forever, leaving nursery rhymes unrhyming and stories filled with gaps.”
― Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation