Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud's maternal lines. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Maud researched her genealogy—her grandfather's marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors' roles in slavery and genocide—and sought family secrets through her DNA. But sunk in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled modernity's dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer's attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry-to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors has for all of us.