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On March 5, Marie Mutsuki Mockett and I will be reading and talking about exorcising the past (all meanings of exorcise possible) at McNally Jackson at 6 p.m.

Marie’s wonderful new book, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, is about death and grief and family and ghosts and so much more. She’ll read from it, and I’ll read from the working introduction to my book on the science and superstition of ancestry, and then we’ll talk about all of that and take questions and comments from you. Hope to see you there!

This image is from one of Marie’s childhood notebooks; she shared it with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop when they visited her writing studio.

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.

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 reviewed Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, which is both gorgeous and terrible (terrible in the King James sense of awesome, dreadful, and fearsome, like when God appears to Moses).

In 2003′s Where I Was From, Joan Didion tells of a long wagon journey on which her great-great-grandmother buried a child, gave birth to another, contracted mountain fever twice, and sewed a quilt, “a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches,” that she must have finished en route, “somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching.” Throughout the book, Didion ruminates on her female forbears, women “pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew,” even their own dead babies.

It was Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana, at age five or six, who first made all this heredity start to seem remote. And if the author harbored any lingering doubt about whether she shared her ancestors’ breaking-clean tendencies, the shattering effect of Quintana’s death in 2005, at age 39, must have swept it away. In her new memoir, Blue Nights, about life before and after the loss of her daughter, Didion writes, “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”

You can read the full review at B&N Review, watch Didion reading from the book in a Daily Beast video, and listen to her talk about it at NPR.

Previously: Didion on psychiatric trends and diagnoses; the specter of the unanswered letter; “I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress”; and a short but revealing 1970 TV interview with Tom Brokaw.

My friend Misha Angrist, a former geneticist and the author of Here is a Human Being At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, answers some of my questions about DNA research at The Awl.

Holy crap, Misha, you’re making your entire genome public! Are you nervous?

It’s already done. All of my data are here. Frankly I don’t think anything in my DNA could be as embarrassing as this kelly green shirt that continues to taunt me from the interwebs.

I spend a lot of time worrying about the long-term consequences of opening the Pandora’s box just by joining 23andMe.

Hmmm. What is it you’re worried about exactly?

Well, in addition to being an enthusiastic neurotic, I’m a hypochondriac with health problems, and I guess I’m anxious that I won’t be able to get insurance coverage in my old age, and I’ll end up being yelled at and bossed around in some grannies’ ward with rows and rows of beds, like in Memento Mori

True, although I suspect that those types of stories are rare. But even if they’re not, I believe that one way of combating/preempting that sort of behavior is by having a cohort of people putting it all out there and seeing what happens. I am fairly well convinced that if an insurer or employer used a Personal Genome Project participant’s data to discriminate against him/her, the personal genomics hive would raise holy hell and quickly create a PR nightmare for the perpetrator.

Ah, so participation is actually a kind of insurance of its own! Where do I sign up?

Yeah, if you fuck with me, then you fuck with all of the public genomes and arguably the entire biomedical research enterprise.

More here, and we continue the conversation at McNally Jackson tonight, at 7 p.m. Join us if you’re free.

My mysterious great aunt has an official archive, apparently. While trying to get my hands on it, I’ve run up against some of the microfilm problems Nicholson Baker detailed in Double Fold.

Back in November, I learned that Maude Newton Simmons, my great-great aunt and (self-given) namesake, was a teacher, an architectural drafter, and a dealer of King Midget cars. The 1977 Delta Democrat-Times profile I unearthed even included a photograph of her, at 92, looking out the window of her vehicle. (That Newspaper Archive subscription was so worth it.)

Shortly after posting about the article, I typed her full married name into Google — you’d think I would’ve done this before — and discovered that Maude was also a writer of sorts. No wonder the family was so cagey about her.
 

Astonishingly, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History maintains a “Maude C. (Newton) Simmons collection” devoted to a newspaper column that she published from 1960-1970.

This collection consists of two 35 mm, positive microfilm rolls of newspaper articles, newsclippings, and correspondence of Maude Newton Simmons. The materials are generally not organized by date or format.

The majority of the newspaper articles by Simmons are typewritten and undated. However, there are a few handwritten articles, and several articles are annotated with her corrections. Her “Drew Doings” articles contained a number of subheadings that varied with each issue. Each article in the column concerned a variety of subjects, including births, deaths, church and school news, politics, sports, topics of community interest, visitors, and poetry composed by Simmons or published authors.

So essentially these are church supper bulletins, but also Civil Rights-Era dispatches from the Mississippi Delta.
 

I’m nervous to read what Maude had to say, but of course I called the library immediately. After several letters back and forth, and a check that was mailed and returned, I’ve learned that the microfilm is badly eroded, and that there are too many pages for the library’s research staff to photograph.

Short of hopping on a plane to Jackson, I’m going to need to purchase copies of the microfilm reels themselves, from an independent vendor, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. Then I’ll have to figure out the best way to read them. The good people at Ask MeFi had some excellent suggestions. If you have any to add, please drop me a line.

Maud is a nickname now, one most of my friends call me, but it started as a pen name. I chose it years ago as a sort of homage to Maude Newton, my great-great aunt, a woman nobody wanted to answer questions about.

For the longest time, I only really knew about her marital separation by peppering. Then census data told me her husband’s last name: Simmons. And in a letter earlier this fall, my granddad’s cousin mentioned that Maude was a schoolteacher.
 

Now here she is, above, at 92, in her King Midget, The World’s Lowest-Priced Car. The photo is taken from James Dickerson’s May 1977 story for the Delta Democrat-Times.

Apparently Maude had seen the company’s ad in National Geographic and called up to say that she’d like to be the Midget Motor Corp dealer for Sunflower County, Mississippi. The top brass were amenable.

When her first King Midget arrived on the train from Athens, Ohio, more than 12 years ago, Mrs. Maude Simmons, 92, of Drew said that Main Street was filled with curiosity seekers.

“It was my first car,” Mrs. Simmons said. “And I couldn’t drive an inch. The man who taught me was a driving instructor at the local school, and he taught me all I needed to know in about two or three days.”

Although she got a deal on the car, which cost her $500, Maude told Dickerson “it was not an easy decision to make.”

“‘My family didn’t want me to do it,’ she said. ‘So I listened to them for about a year. Then I wrote the company anyway and told them to send me a car.’”
 

As for the King Midget itself, Dickerson reports:

Not everything has worked out the way she planned, though, over the years she has been unable to sell a single King Midget…. But there are also advantages of a unique sort.

“I ran off the road once,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it, when some fellow came along and helped me out. It wasn’t any trouble at all. He just pulled it out of the ditch by hand.”

The article also reveals that Maude’s house was filled with books and magazines, and that she met Simmons in Indiana, where she had a job in an architectural office. “‘I learned how to do house plans there,’” she explained. “‘In fact, I did the plans for this very house I’m living in right now.”
 

She also remembered teaching in southern Mississippi “‘when we had Halley’s Comet.’” “‘That was 1910, the year Mark Twain died,’” she adds. “‘When the comet came over we all went outside to have a look.’”

Twain was born shortly before it passed, and died the day after its return. “It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet,” he reportedly said. “‘The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

Like most people, Maude, who was born in 1885, got to see the comet only once. She died in 1981, at the age of 97.
 

According to her death certificate, my mother’s half-sister Bonnie died of diphtheria — “the deadly scourge of childhood” — at five years old, in a town not too far from Dallas.

An aggressive vaccination campaign began in the region around the same time, but perhaps it took a while for word to reach the provinces, or maybe traveling for the shot seemed too cumbersome or securing it was too costly.
 

The year was 1932. The Great Depression was in full swing and abandonment was on the rise. Bonnie’s parents had already divorced a few years before, leaving her to live as a boarder, apparently in the house of a family friend or a stranger, by the time of the 1930 census.

It’s unclear who was caring for her toward the end of her short life.

Judging from studies of children’s living conditions at the time, Bonnie’s predicament was not terribly unusual.

By 1930 most states had passed compulsory school attendance laws for those under sixteen, established public high schools (although many were segregated), and placed restrictions on the industrial employment of young people under fourteen years of age. In addition, medical science had made great strides in treating and preventing childhood diseases such as diarrhea, rickets, and diphtheria.

Child welfare experts attending President Herbert Hoover’s 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection pointed to the progress that had been made for American children. In his opening address, Hoover waxed sympathetic about the value of children, but there were few positive results from the 1930 conference. The Hoover administration seemed to turn a blind eye to the worsening economic conditions for youngsters and their families. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, a medical doctor, argued in 1932 that the economic Depression could actually be good for children. Families with less money to spend, Wilbur concluded, would be forced to depend upon each other and live a more wholesome home life.

It was obvious to many others that a growing number of American children and their families were living in miserable conditions during the worsening economic crisis. By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933 it was clear that children were experiencing some of the Depression’s worst consequences. While the national divorce rate did not rise, desertion became more common. Although infant mortality rates had continued to fall during 1931 and 1932, they were climbing again by 1933 for the first time since such data had been collected in the United States. With unemployment rates at 25 percent, many families that had been middle-class during the 1920s slipped into poverty, contributing to rising incidence of hunger and malnutrition among children and adolescents. Psychological stress on adults resulted in domestic violence and child abuse. School districts ran out of money, classrooms became more crowded, school years were shortened, and many young people dropped out of school to seek work. Cash strapped business owners and parents ignored or intentionally violated existing child labor laws. Franklin Roosevelt noted that one-third of America’s citizens were ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. Of those, the majority were children.

For more, see Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters From Children of the Great Depression. I was also interested to read this 1930 Atlantic article on high medical bills and poverty. Amazing how little progress we’ve made.

The image at the top of this post, obviously, is part of a public awareness campaign for polio. I haven’t been able to locate any older diphtheria posters online.

My mother was his only surviving child, but her father always said he had another during his first marriage (of thirteen). He led Mom to believe that the baby died as an infant.

In fact, I discovered this weekend, the little girl lived nearly six years.
 

Nettie Mason was sixteen and Robert Bruce was seventeen when they wed in May, 1925. A year later Nettie gave birth to Bonnie Katharine Bruce, and three years after that, just months before the start of the Great Depression, Nettie and Robert divorced.

The announcement below appeared in the July 26, 1929, issue of the Dallas Morning News.

By the time of the 1930 census, three-year-old Bonnie was living as a “boarder,” apparently without either parent or any other relatives, in a house in Arcadia Park, a section of Oak Cliff.

Two years later she died in Denton. Of what, I don’t know. Neglect? Starvation? Tuberculosis? I’ve requested a full death certificate in hopes of finding out.
 

Previously in Robert Bruce lore: his thirteen marriages, including the wife who shot him in the stomach and the one he cheated on my grandmother with; the adultery letters; his careers as union president and garment cutter, mechanic, and Phoenix real estate agent; his obituary, and his early and final last will and testament.

I’m not sure what it means when I fixate on genealogical research, as I have been recently, but I have learned to recognize flare-ups of ancestry.com obsession as a warning sign.

Normal people are not awake after midnight, scouring the 1800 U.S. Census for clues about one Jesse Newton, born in North Carolina, who later bought land in Drew County, Arkansas, and was “granted a license to retail spirituous and vinous liquors.” Especially if they’re not even sure that Jesse Newton is their ancestor.
 

Worse, although I thought I was done feeling anything in particular about my dad, I’ve been Googling him. As my sister points out, combing the Internet for information about your estranged father from your day job desk at 7:30 p.m. is a sure sign that you are not over it.

Apparently he bought a house for $2.6 million the day after my birthday. Probably the timing was a coincidence. Like the having a wife with my name, and the now-dead-girlfriend with my sister’s.
 

I was surprised at how much seeing his McMansion, complete with poolside statuary (pictured above), hurt. Although I’ve never been a beneficiary of his fortune, I knew he’d been amassing one. Accumulating wealth was his greatest priority throughout my childhood, back when he used to spray the toaster with Raid before making my breakfast, when he relied on my grandmother to cover my doctor bills, when he promised to pay for all of my law school education if I attended the cheaper, less well-regarded state school, instead of the private one, and then reneged after I did it. Etc.

Do you think he’ll give his new kids different names, or just stick with the ones he knows?
 

I’ll try to refocus soon. Meanwhile, here’s a post I wrote years ago about my dad and the house where we used to live: Unpleasant (and disjointed) recollections of my father.