Feb. 1—Larry Hurto has a love for history, and he has a considerable love for Newton history. And it certainly shows in his book "Stories From Downtown," made in partnership with Newton Main Street.

Everyone's family tree has some gnarled branches. In the author Maud Newton's past, there are ancestors who committed violence, extremism, racism and worse. Rather than shove that inheritance under ...

In "America's Ancestry Craze," her 2014 Harper's cover story on genealogy, genetics, and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from, Maud Newton writes that her research ("whole weekends ...