My sleuthing began in a spirit of gleeful defiance shadowed by a grimly obstinate self-righteousness. I got interested in researching my father’s family when I learned there were things they didn’t want me to know. And his father, my great-grandfather, really did kill a man with a hay hook, though it was an accident outside a feed store one morning rather than the swashbuckling bourbon-soaked bar fight I’d imagined. My mom’s father married at least ten times, to nine women. Granny’s father was a member of the Dallas County Local of Socialists. Had my maternal grandmother’s father really been a communist in early twentieth-century Dallas? Had my mom’s father really married thirteen times? Had his father really killed a man with a hay hook? Slowly I confirmed these stories, at least partly. When I did start researching my ancestors, only my mother’s side interested me: the Texan rabble-rousers, scoundrels, and misfits I’d grown up hearing about. So I never expected to become interested in compiling my own family tree. He was an avowed white supremacist, a defender of slavery, and I aspired then to be as little like him and his branch of my family as possible. Growing up, I associated genealogy with the begats of the Bible, with an old family tree my father showed me, and with my father’s reverence for the Old South.

Ancestor trouble book review