cestor Trouble,” she was brought up to
care about her ancestors by an abusive
father who “viewed his and my fair skin
as a mark of superiority” and revered
their Confederate forebears. Her book
succeeds best as an exploration of the
racism that has pervaded American ge-
nealogical practice. She describes how,
trying to escape her father’s prejudices,
she took on “Maud” as a
nom de plume, inspired by
a great-great-aunt Maude
whom she believed to have
been appealingly feminist
and nonconformist. But
“a genealogist’s family tree
is always evolving, as is the
genealogist,” Newton notes,
and further research re-
vealed that her great-great-
aunt was a racist supporter
of Jim Crow. “In naming myself Maud
Newton, I’d accidentally honored the
parts of my family history that trouble
me most.”
As genealogy in the twenty-first
century increasingly became the prov-
ince of science and corporate labora-
tories, Newton’s own quest turned spir-
itual. She began to practice “ancestral
lineage healing,” a New Age-style ini-
tiative informed by shamanism and
other kinds of ancestor veneration, and
her book delivers a heartfelt endorse-
ment of its individual emotional and
psychological rewards. This approach
firmly rejects the quantitative logic of
genetic tests, which reduces people to
percentages. It’s revealing, however,
that the term of art for the process is
“ancestor work” (echoing the Mormon
“temple work”), as opposed to, say,
“ancestor worship.” As marketed by
companies such as the North Carolina-
based Ancestral Medicine, it shares
the commercial apparatus of retreats,
courses, trainings, and self-help books
characteristic of today’s “wellness”
and “mindfulness” movements. In the
genetic-testing industry, customers pay
to surrender their property; in this one,
they pay to do the work.
Like Newton, many individuals and
institutions in the United States have
had to contend with a racist past. Often,
they have committed themselves to a
kind of collective lineage repair—tak-
ing down the Confederate monuments
erected by white-supremacist heritage
organizations, renaming Columbus Day,
receiving anti-racist training, deliver-
ing land acknowledgments. These ges-
tures do little to address the material
effects of generational dispossession.
But discussions of concrete repair come
with challenging questions about who
deserves recompense, and from whom
it should come. Witness the contro-
versial American Descen-
dants of Slavery movement,
which seeks reparations
specifically for Black peo-
ple who can show that
their ancestors were en-
slaved in the United States,
not elsewhere in the Black
diaspora. When reparative
justice is fitted into the
template of genealogy,
there’s a risk of recapitulat-
ing deep-seated lineal distinctions be-
tween the deserving and the undeserv-
ing, the pure and the polluted.
Genealogy as a technique may bring
individual rewards, but as a historical
paradigm it has tended to serve those
in power, and such effects are not di-
minishing. Élite colleges are recruiting
“first generation” students but continue
to grant special admissions to “lega-
cies.” The U.S. government taxes a
smaller share of estates than do the
governments of comparable nations,
but the American Dream of genera-
tional upward mobility has slipped far-
ther out of reach. The medical estab-
lishment promises great things from
the advent of accessible genetic medi-
cine, but there remain circumstances
in which Americans can be denied in-
surance coverage on the basis of their
“preëxisting” genes.
“To plant a family!” Nathaniel Haw-
thorne exclaimed in his novel about
ancestral ghosts, “The House of the
Seven Gables.” “This idea is at the bot-
tom of most of the wrong and mischief
which men do. The truth is, that, once
in every half century, at longest, a fam-
ily should be merged into the great,
obscure mass of humanity, and forget
all about its ancestors.” It’s tempting
to agree. Yet if there is one thing that
the history of genealogy makes clear
it is that stories about ancestry can al-
ways be instruments of exclusion. To
forget about where we come from can
be a privilege, too.