Ancestor Trouble - Maud Newton

 Sub-title: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
This was a fascinating read!  The author weaves stories of her lives into the history of genealogy and her family.  It's a rolling journey connecting epigenetics, genograms, forced sterilization, neuroscience, DNA, kinship and even spiritual practices that reflect our family ties over the generations.   

Quotes:

p. 50 "As of 2019, 23andMe's data set for sub-Saharan African ancestry relies on only 1,980 reference individuals...1,634 Central and South Asian...Europeans..6,328."

p. 51 "...African Ancestry, a Black-owned site with more than 30,000 Indigenous African DNA samples."

[Note: invalid comparison I noted to author and she replied she would review and correct]

p. 66 "...any genomic predictions that were removed from the outward-facing, customer perspective are still available to 23andMe - and its investors."

p.67 "Daniela Hernandez...Splinter..Ancestry has been collecting ancestral data about its users for decades."

p. 68 "empathy gene...has never been incorporated into 23andMe's own results (GG at Rs53576)"

p.143 "[Craig] Venter conceded in his 2007 memoir, A Life Decoded, Genes are not the whole story."

p.185 "Emotional recurrences in families...I often think family patterns are the primary existential conundrum we all have incommon, apart from death and basic needs like food and shelter.."

p. 187 "Touched by Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison...the particular type of family tree that populates Jamison's book is called a genogram (or sometimes a genosociogram).  These graphs can be useful for mapping traits through families but are similar to those used for pedigrees generated by the Eugenic Record Office...in 1910."

p. 234 "...so many of us spend our lives struggling with or against our ancestors' dreams without knowing precisely how or why."

Published: 2022  Read: May 2022  Genre: Memoir