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My mom was something like a mommy-blogger, in 1973. From the time I was two to two-and-a-half, she wrote these astoundingly detailed letters about our lives and me and Miami, typed them up in quintuplicate, and mailed them to the whole family. I have multiple copies of some of them.

They’re an amazing resource for my book, and they prove, as she’s always claimed and I’ve doubted, that I was talking in complete sentences when I turned two. Apparently I was also always concerned with remembering everything that happened.

On the one hand the letters make me happy, because I can verrrry hazily remember some of what she describes, and because they’re so full of pride and love, but they also make me sad, because I can see how lonely she was.

At Slate, Ariel Bogle recaps a discussion I had last week with AJ Jacobs, Wilhelmina Rhodes-Kelly, and Chris Whitten on how technology is affecting the family tree. I talked a little bit about what drew me to research my ancestry in the first place.

Although technology is changing the way we discover our personal histories, the reasons why people may begin to investigate in the first place have stayed the same. Curiosity, of course, but also a sense of history. Maud Newton told the audience how her interest in her family tree was sparked by the improbable stories her mother told about their predecessors. But the importance of ancestry cut very close for Newton. “I myself was basically a eugenics project,” she said. “My parents married because they thought they would have smart children together, not because they loved each other.” Her father was particularly obsessed with the idea of purity of blood, she added. “Someone suggested to me that there might be something [my father] was hiding, and then I got really interested.”

We had lots of fun; I don’t think any of us were ready for the panel to end when it did, and how often can you say that? The audio is below Bogle’s summary, if you’d like to listen.

In related reading: at Tin House, my series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry is ongoing. Guests so far are Laila Lalami, Celeste Ng, Saeed Jones, and Christopher Beha. And at The Begats, I’ve written in the last few months about Alexander Chee’s jokbo (gorgeous books recording his family history back to the Joseon Dynasty, which began in 1392), ancestor worship in the Old Testament, and some disappointing (but not too surprising) discoveries about my self-given namesake, Maude Newton Simmons, among other things.

The stark and stunning image above is a grave map — taken from Alex’s jokbo — for one of his ancestors.

I’ve always been interested in the ways writers think about family history—and especially about echoes, or the lack thereof, through the generations—if they do, as they work. I’m grateful to Tin House for allowing me to indulge this curiosity in a new series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry. First up, Christopher Beha:

Maud Newton: When we first met to talk about the essay I eventually ended up writing for Harper’s, you mentioned an ancestral house upstate where your family spends time every summer. Do you think visiting that old homestead has influenced your thinking about ancestry?

 

Christopher Beha: Without a doubt. The house was built by the first Behas of my line to come to America from Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. They farmed for a couple of generations on land my family still owns, and members of the family continued to spend a lot of time there after my great-great grandmother moved the family down to New York City. So there’s a lot of family history there. There are still some Behas living in the area (though they pronounce the name differently than my family does), and there is a Beha Road not far from the house. I can walk a mile down the road to the churchyard and see the graves of Matthias and Theresa Beha, my great-great-great grandparents, who brought their family over 150 years ago. All of this has influenced my sense of ancestry as something that is still present in my world, even if it is often invisible.

The rest is here. Future interview subjects will include Laila Lalami, Emily Mandel, Celeste Ng, Saeed Jones, and Katherine Faw Morris.

In the past couple years my mom has taught me and reminded me of a few more of my Texan granny’s favorite expressions. Some highlights:

• Quiet as a little mouse peeing on cotton. (Usually used when someone reacts with stunned silence to some sort of diatribe or revelation.)
• You can’t get all your coons up one tree. (You can’t get everything you want.)
• Told them how the cows ate the cabbage. (Describes a serious dressing-down.)
• Pitiful as a sick kitten on a hot rock. (Depressed and listless, very sympathetically so.)
• She got her tail up over her back. (In preparation to sting, like a scorpion. My grandmother called scorpions “stinging lizards.”)
• Happy as a dead pig in the sunshine. (In blissful unawareness of some terrible or embarrassing thing.)
• Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (A phrase my grandmother often used when schooling my father on the ways of my mom, i.e., the intractability of Texan women in general.)

Ancestry is a fundamental perplexity of life. We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, but we are separate beings. We begin with the sperm of one man and the egg of one woman, and then we enter the world and we become ourselves.

 

Beyond all that’s encoded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes—our hair, eyes, and skin of a certain shade, our frame and stature, our sensitivity to bitter tastes—we are bundles of opinions and ambitions, of shortcomings and talents. The alchemy between our genes and our individuality is a mystery we keep trying to solve.

The June issue of Harper’s – with my essay on America’s (and my) ancestry obsession — will be available on newsstands for about the next two to three weeks, if you were planning to pick up a copy. The paragraphs quoted above are a teeny excerpt.

You can read more about the essay and my writing of it in the Dallas Morning News and at PEN, and hear more in interviews with KERA and Wisconsin Public Radio.

I’ll be at Cafe Society this Friday, June 6, to discuss the essay and the book.

I’m ecstatic to announce that Andrea Walker of Random House has acquired my forthcoming book on the science and superstition of ancestry, a subject that has obsessed me for years because of my own family and also because of the way it obsesses the culture at large. While writing my new story for Harper’s, “America’s Ancestry Craze,” I realized that it was mounting — and over the years had been mounting — into a much bigger project.

Here’s the announcement: “Random House will publish writer and critic Maud Newton’s first book, an examination of her obsession with genealogy and her own colorful family history, along with the science and superstition of ancestry in the culture at large.  Newton’s essay, ‘America’s Ancestry Craze,’ is the cover story for the current issue of Harper’s magazine.  This interdisciplinary study will draw on memoir, reporting, cultural criticism, scientific and anthropological research to understand the fear and fascination behind genealogy, and why it has become the second most popular hobby in the United States.  Newton began blogging about books and culture in 2002; within a few years her site was one of the most widely praised and quoted in the industry, and she began writing for the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR, among others.  Random House senior editor Andrea Walker pre-empted North American rights from Julie Barer at Barer Literary.”

Andrea and I first met while she was at the New Yorker, after she wrote nice things about a novel excerpt of mine that Narrative published, and since then I’ve followed her career with admiration and excitement. I’m thrilled to be working with her and the rest of the Random House team! And now you know what I’ll be doing for the next couple years.

My essay, “America’s Ancestry Craze,” is the cover story of the June issue of Harper’s! It’s an outgrowth of a longtime obsession, as people who visited this site in the long-ago days when it was frequently updated might recall.

Friends and readers who connected with me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram have been posting photos of the cover, and every time I see one it gives me a thrill. You can subscribe to read the article online, download the app to buy the issue, or pick it up on newsstands on May 21, which is my birthday.

I’ll be talking about the piece and my interest in ancestry more generally at Lauren Cerand’s Cafe Society on June 6. Details are in her Tiny Letter, if you’re interested.

You can also follow my continuing obsession with the subject — a sort of miscellany clipboard for the book I’m writing — at The Begats.

The photos above are, in order: from my editor at Harper’s, Christopher Beha; two from my dear friend Alexander Chee’s Facebook page; from Virginia Hatfield; from Patrick Nathan; from Cathy Day; from Joe Mozingo; and from my old pal A.V. Cook‘s (holla, Florida!) Facebook page.

My new site, The Begats, obsesses over ancestry miscellany of all kinds: genealogical, historical, cultural, scientific, religious, superstitious, personal. If you’re into this kind of nerdery, submit stuff!

And if you’re curious about my own family history, I wrote a lot of posts about my research back in the day, starting here.

Sad news on the family front, so I’ll have to introduce this mini-interview with Kathleen Kent by repeating what I’ve said: Her first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, evokes the fears, diseases, and petty grudges of the witch trials era with an eerie, visceral concreteness. The book was inspired by Kent’s ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was jailed, tried, found to be a witch, and hung. To her dying breath, she refused to confess, or to beg for leniency.

Below Kent answers my questions about the book and Carrier’s legacy.
 

I read in the Dallas Morning News that you first heard of Martha Carrier as a child at your grandma’s house, when she and your mom were gossiping about relatives. Was there a sense that Martha and her cruel treatment resonated in the present?

What I mean is: In

I think one of the most remarkable aspects of the family stories about Martha Carrier was how present she seemed to me growing up. There was hardly a family gathering when her name wasn’t brought up. My mother’s family was very much interested in American history, as well as personal family history, and so there was a great awareness of the events leading up to the Salem witch trials.

Even though it was my grandfather who was the Carrier, my grandmother was the repository of all the generational legends and she was not only fiercely proud of the courageous stand Martha took against her accusers, but very gleeful of the fact that her outspokenness earned her the moniker “The Queen of Hell,” the name given to her by one of the most famous theologians of the day, Cotton Mather. There were quite a few ferocious, independent women in the Carrier family including my grandmother, who smoked at a time when it was considered scandalous, rode wild horses (and a few cows), and was a dead shot with a rifle.
 

There’s nothing like a ferocious Texan woman. (One of my most cherished photos is of my Dallas-born grandmother saluting with a double-barrel shotgun — and she wasn’t even the one who shot my mother’s father in the stomach.)

In

It was always my intent to write fiction. In the first draft, the narrative was in the voice of Martha, but, as there was so much of the family story left to tell after her death, I decided to shift it to Sarah’s point of view. I felt it would give the story greater emotional tension to see the horrors of the witch trials from a child’s perspective. I also felt that the struggle for understanding between a mother and daughter is a universal theme. Sarah’s character is based, in part, on my grandmother’s reckless and unconventional personality.
 

Early in the book, shortly after the family moves to a new town and is, after some debate (and intervention by the town elders), allowed to stay, one of the children is felled by smallpox. Sarah and her baby sister are shipped off in the night to live with their kind aunt and their entertaining, but falsely pious, drunkard uncle.

This section of the story is crucial, both structurally and thematically, because it immerses the reader in a more conventional Puritan household — where fears of God and disease determine so much of the way days are spent — and presents this alternative way of life from the young Sarah’s idealized perspective. When the girls are thrust back into their mother’s care, the reader feels as uncertain and unsteady as they do. Did you do much research, or mostly rely on instinct, in differentiating these households?

What a lot people are accustomed to imagining about Puritans, I believe, is a result of the idealized and romanticised influence of the Victorian ideal; the prim and proper settlers of New England who were industrious, God-fearing and righteous. And they were these things, but they were also, according to the local records, contentious and libelous, full of supersitious dread and malicious gossip. The biggest surprise for me in doing the research was in realizing that the Puritans in character were closer to the Elizabethans than the Victorians.

From this stew of religious repression, fear of the native people, and their mistrust and intolerance of their own neighbors, I built up the two families, the Carriers and the Toothakers. In contrasting the day to day life of these separate and distinct families, I hoped to reveal Sarah’s growing understanding of the harsh and difficult life into which she was born.
 

At the end of the novel, Sarah learns a secret about her father. I was surprised by this plot twist and am still digesting it. Did you know his background from the beginning? Is it, like Martha’s, based in fact? And is this the set-up for a sequel?

Thomas Carrier according to family legends was over 7 feet tall, died at 109 years old, and fought for Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War. Ben Franklin’s paper “Poor Richard” reported in 1735 that two coffins has to be fit together to bury Thomas as he was so tall. These, and other legends about the patriarch, were told with as much enthusiasm as the stories of Martha. I am currently at work on the second novel, which is a prequel to “The Heretic’s Daughter, and it explores the life of Thomas and his involvement in Cromwell’s army and the execution of King Charles I of England .
 

It’s amazing that these legends have been handed down intact through the generations. Julie Barer, your agent and a friend of mine, told me that the girls in your family weren’t allowed to dress up as witches for Halloween because the awareness of Martha’s persecution was ever-present. Do I have that right?

As my mother made most of my Halloween costumes, she had the final word on what I got to wear. It’s not that she forbade me, or was humorless about it, but she actively discouraged it. She felt it trivialized the suffering of innocents and promoted stereotypes of the Salem witches as evil Devil worshippers.
 

A principled and well-reasoned objection. (At my house there was no Halloween, only “Hallelujah.”) Many thanks, Kathleen.

It doesn’t surprise me that Sarah Vowell, a refugee from the Pentecostals, is obsessed with the Puritans. After all, John Winthrop’s vision of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city set on a hill” figures as prominently in the catechism of American fundamentalists, and arguably in our country’s psyche, as the section of the Beatitudes that inspired him.

Vowell spent several years researching and writing The Wordy Shipmates, her new book (out 10/7) on the subject. I’ve been skipping around rather than reading straight through, but one thing she does well here is to trace the view of Americans as God’s new chosen people — sorry, Israel, your job now is merely to hasten the arrival of the Anti-Christ — all the way back to the Mayflower.
 

In 1630, the Reverend John Cotton delivered a farewell sermon in England, just before the voyage set sail, that infused the journey with a sense of purpose. According to Vowell:

What Cotton [tells] them is that, like the Old Testament Jews, they are men of destiny. And, like the Old Testament Jews, God has given them a new home, a promised land. And, like the old Testament Jews, God has printed up eviction notices for them to tack up on the homes of the nothing-special, just-folks folks who are squatting there.

Sexy stuff Puritan doctrine is not, but so much of what this country has done since can be traced back to its original perception of itself not just as special, but anointed by God. But woe betide the Puritan nonconformist.
 

My mother used to say demons lurked in every corner, every throw pillow, every stranger’s hand. They were waiting to leap the moment I showed weakness, however small, however accidental. Accepting an owl necklace or falling asleep with the TV on could leave me vulnerable; I might be possessed by foul spirits and not even know it.

Maybe this is why the Salem witch trials — the stories of women drowned for allegiance to Satan — have always been a particular source of fascination for me, and why I was so drawn to Kathleen Kent’s first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter. The first half of the book evokes the fears, diseases, and petty grudges of the witch trials era with an eerie and visceral concreteness. The novel was inspired by the the author’s ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was jailed, found to be a witch, and hung. I’ll be doing a Weekend Ancestry conversation with Kent in the next week or two.
 

Reading The Heretic’s Daughter prompted me to investigate the life of Mary Bliss Parsons, my own 9th great-grandmother, who beat witchcraft charges — twice. (Longtime readers may recall that the Parsons family isn’t exactly overjoyed to have me as a cousin.)

Joseph Cornet Parsons, Mary’s husband, moved his family to Northampton, Massachusetts, when his wife couldn’t get along in Springfield. She was beautiful and opinionated, with a “harsh,” “often accusatory” manner, and she was given to “fits” that caused Joseph to lock her in the basement. According to the authors of Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England,

She and her husband were frequently and notoriously at odds with one another. During part of their time at Springfield he had sought to confine her to their house. (Otherwise, he said, “she would go out in the night … and when she went out a woman went with her and came in with her.”) When this tactic failed, he locked her in the asement. It was then, she claimed later on, that she had first encountered her “spirits.” [Ed note: It is unclear whether Mary herself admitted to seeing spirits, or whether a neighbor just claimed she had told stories about them.] There was at least one quite public expisode — again at Springfield — that amounted to a family free-for-all. Joseph was “beating one of his little children, for losing its shoe,” when Mary came running “to save it, because she had beaten it before as she said.” Whereupon Joseph thrust her away, and the two of them continued to struggle until he “had in a sort beaten [her].”

Witchcraft accusations surfaced against Goody Parsons shortly after the family moved to Northampton. Mary gave birth to a healthy baby boy — Ebenezer, her fifth child — and the following year a neighbor’s newborn died. Sarah Bridgman, the grieving mother, claimed Mary had cursed the baby.

Joseph tried to spare the family’s good(?) name by going on the offensive. No stranger to the courtroom, he initiated a defamation suit against Sarah Bridgman, the neighbor who started the rumors after her own baby died. This was a tricky approach. While the “immediate outcome of these actions was usually favorable to the plaintiff,” the “long-range effects were mixed.”

Sure enough, Joseph prevailed at trial, but new witchcraft claims landed Mary in court again 18 years later, and this time she was the defendant. Most of the evidence from this trial has been lost. The indictment remains:

Mary Parsons, the wife of Joseph Parsons, … being instigated by the Devil, hath … entered into familiarity with the Devil, and committed several acts of witchcraft on the person or persons of one or more.

Ultimately the jury acquitted Mary, but her case is seen as a precursor to the Salem Witch Hysteria of 1692.
 

On a personal level, what interests me most is the way Mary’s behavior and the suspicion against her have echoed down through my mother’s line, from the seeing of “spirits” to accusations of Devil Worship. When I was a child, the Presbyterians and Baptists all but called Mom a Satanist as they showed us the door.

The legacy of loudmouthed, intractable women might run back generations in the other direction, too. By all accounts Mary’s mother Margaret was prickly and litigious. The image at the top of this post is a reportedly a transcription of Margaret’s testimony in Mary’s slander trial.

It’s not as if anyone is clamoring for more family photos, but I figured I should mention that from now on the ancestry posts will appear intermittently, if at all.

For a year and a half, all of my photos and newspaper articles and official documents must remain sealed, along with my composition notebooks and paperwork, in these giant Ziplocs. If you don’t know why someone would have to sequester her papers like this, I hope you never find out.
 

Can you guess what we in the Maud Household have been missing most? Here’s a hint:

Have a good weekend, everybody.

My mom didn’t know most of the women her dad married, but in email last year she remembered a handful. While going through the list, she casually referred to a shooting. Of her father. Possibly by one of the wives.

Next (I think) he married a woman named Evelyn, and, believe it or not, they lived on Daniels Avenue on SMU campus right down the street from my sorority house where I lived for 3 years while in college. She may be the one he was married to when he was shot in the gut and nearly died. I think she shot him but don’t know for sure. Daddy led quite a life: women — perferably ones with money, which he took and made tons more with. However, he was an alcoholic “rounder-hellraiser.” All the money the ladies had he used to fund various business ventures. At one time he was the best auto mechanic with a full-repair location in Dallas. Then he was a true master grocer of privately owned grocery stores. Granny met him when she worked for Justin McCarty (one of the top clothing designers/mfrs in the country — even up till the 70’s). He was their most outstanding designer and pattern drafter. He had other talents but those are the ones I remember. Mr. McCarty would say of my dad that he was a real genius of the business and would go far if he would leave the bottle alone.

People tend to think my mom’s kidding when she drops a bombshell like that.

No, I assure them, she’s not kidding. She is absolutely not kidding. It’s just that she hasn’t gotten around to mentioning that particular near-homicide until that very moment. Also, deadpan runs in the family.

Still, understandably, people doubt. And sometimes, so do I. But it occurred to me the other day that newspapers love a domestic meltdown, so I went fishing in the Dallas Morning News archives. Sure enough, I found a brief item (above) dated July 24, 1950.
 

According to the story: Robert Bruce, 46, was indeed shot by his wife. The shooting “apparently followed an argument” (you don’t say), and the couple “had been married only a few weeks.” Bail was set at $2500. ($21,959.85 today, according to the inflation calculator.)

It’s hard to track down Dallas Times-Herald archives — the paper ceased publication in 1992 and consequently hasn’t been digitized — but with the help of the Dallas Public Library I intend to check those, too.