She found records of marriages and trials, wills in which her ancestors gave slaves to their spouses and children. She signed up for an online account and began researching her genealogy. But the meeting of their lines in her was something she could not shake. Maud's parents' marriage was acrimonious, their divorce a relief. Her mother was a whirlwind of charisma and passions that could become obsessions she kept over thirty cats and birds in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, and later started a church in her living room, where she would perform exorcisms. He was obsessed with maintaining the purity of his family bloodline, which he could trace back to the days of the Revolutionary War. Maud's father had a master's in aerospace engineering on scholarship from an Ivy League university and was valedictorian of his law school class he also viewed slavery as a benevolent institution that should never have been disbanded, and would paint over the faces of brown children in her storybooks. On her father's side, a Massachusetts ancestor was accused of being a witch, who cast sickness on her neighbor's ox and was later tried in court for causing the death of a child. His father purportedly killed a man in the street with a hay hook, and later died in a mental institution. Her mother's father, who came of age during the Great Depression in Texas, was supposedly married thirteen times, and survived being shot in the stomach by one of his wives. 'Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl.

Ancestor trouble book review