That line of thinking brought me right back to my original dilemma. I still had no confirmation that Dennis actually carried the Crooks Y. He had never matched anyone named Crooks. And I was still telling myself that the Meek match was a meaningless accident, a coincidence, but the possibility remained that it was not. Late one night I emailed the Meek contact on Dennis’s list, and a Mrs. Meek in Virginia replied. She told me that the Y she had sent in for testing belonged to her husband and that he had a long ancestry in the United States and before that in Scotland. But at that point he had not been tested beyond twelve markers. That left open the possibility that Mr. Meek could still match my uncle if he were tested for more markers. A quick search of old English registers revealed that there were Meeks in Lancashire just as there were Crookses. That meant I couldn’t rule out the idea that my uncle carried the Y of a Meek man. If I was going to start soliciting DNA from strangers named Crooks, I had better be damn sure I’d actually be comparing it to another Crooks sample.
My mother and I had hardly spoken of the matter since I’d first broached it the previous fall. I kept her up-to-date with the information flowing from Dennis’s DNA results, my correspondence with Mel, the old Crooks manor I learned about in Whittle-le-Woods. My mother seemed content, as I was, to simply follow the trail blindly for a while. Still, she wasn’t at all surprised when I told her that spring that at last I felt I had to ask Basil for his DNA. If his Y matched up with Dennis’s, I told her, we’d be in the clear. “Let’s pray to God it is the same,” she said.
Uncle Basil was the perfect confirmation sample. He looks a lot like my grandfather. If appearances can be trusted, he carries the Crooks Y chromosome as surely as he does the Crooks curls. Also, his youngest daughter, Simone, has the best example of that celebrated head of hair in our family—long, kinky tendrils that would seem to stretch back to an elusive island past. Uncle Basil and my Aunty Norma live near my parents too. They were the first of the Crookses to emigrate from England in the late 1960s, raising four children and building a successful electronics business. It was their reports from Canada that made it a magnet for the rest of the family. So much space! Everything so new! Bitter winters, yes, but the promise of beautiful summers, and a bright future in a young country where immigrants were welcome.
Simone happened to be visiting when I dropped in on them, and she joined my uncle and me around the dining table, catching up. They asked how the research was going so far and I waffled my way through an explanation. I told Uncle Basil it looked as if Uncle Dennis’s Y chromosome could be traced back to Europe but that I needed another sample to verify the results. My uncle said he was curious to see how the search would turn out. He was too young to recall any details about the Captain’s story, but he hoped we could learn something at last about the family’s connection to Jamaica. I drove his sample straight to the post office that afternoon, impatient for the result yet dreading it too.
On a morning in late spring when my parents were out, Aunty Merlyn dropped off a package for me in their mailbox. I drove out to pick it up as soon as my mother called, eager to see what Dennis had assembled. On the kitchen table sat a large white envelope containing four sheets of paper, all of them photocopies of old documents. One was a copy from Bombay’s Public Health Department: my grandfather Freddie’s birth record of January 31, 1905. Under the heading “caste” it said “Eurasian,” and it noted his father’s occupation as chief officer aboard SS Ahmadi. On the same page was a copy of my great-grandfather’s certificate of death at the age of thirty-two, on September 29, 1906, listing the cause as beriberi. This time his occupation was recorded as captain of SS Rahmani; to my surprise, it listed his “caste” as “American.” I wondered if the form had been filled out on the orders of his mysterious relatives in New York, the ones said to be tight with the Freemasons and who had wanted to adopt my grandfather after the captain died.
There was a copy of my grandfather’s 1906 baptismal certificate, from Emmanuel Church in Bombay, and a copy of the 1902 registration of marriage between my great-grandparents, Bridget Jane Meek and Frederick William Crooks. Under the heading for parents of the groom, it included the name of the Captain’s father, my great-great-grandfather, George Atkinson Crooks. But by far the most significant document—the one I would study hard in the weeks ahead—was a legal-sized paper stamped “Certified Copy of an Entry in the Register of Baptisms.” It was from the General Register Office, Spanish Town, Jamaica, and handwritten with the lavish elegance of a bygone era.
Register of Baptisms kept by E.A. Stewart, Minister to the Parish of Trelawny in the County of Cornwall in the year 1874.
When and where born: 17 July, 1873, Falmouth
Name: Frederick William Crooks
Sex: Male
Complexion: Col’d
Legitimate: Legit
When Baptized: 30 June 1874
Name of Father: George A. Crooks
Name and Maiden Name of Mother: Cath. Storks, Cath. Crooks
Rank or Profession of Father: Accountant
Abode: Falmouth
I called my parents to come take a look and we dissected the document for the new details it contained: the names of both the Captain’s parents, that his father had been an accountant. And—unlike the charcoal sketch that had left open for debate the shade of my great-grandfather’s skin—this form, under the heading “complexion,” right there in black and white, described him as “coloured.” Coloured, my father was quick to point out, was the most general term used by colonialists to describe anyone of mixed ancestry. To me the word was instant corroboration of the sub-Saharan African markers that had been tagged in my mother’s DNA, of what we could see with our own eyes in the features of family members. Yet it brought with it so many more questions: Had the Captain’s kinfolk been mostly black? The Captain had clearly been born free, and his father, an accountant, must have been a free man. But slavery was abolished in Jamaica only in 1838. Had the Captain’s grandparents—my mother’s ancestors, and mine—been born in bondage?
We were bewildered by the mention of Falmouth as their place of residence. “I thought they were from Kingston,” I said. “Yes,” my mother said, “I only ever heard they were from Kingston.”
When I called Dennis to thank him for the documents, I asked him if he knew anything about George Atkinson Crooks or if he could shed any light on this unexpected mention of Falmouth. But he said, “No, my girl, I don’t know anything about Falmouth. I always thought Papa’s people were from Kingston.”
It was entirely plausible that after two generations nobody would have a clue where the Captain had grown up, let alone where he had been born. It had taken some time before anyone recalled that Trichinopoly was the birthplace of Nana Gladys; certainly she never spoke much of it. And what did my siblings or I know about Jabalpur, the Indian city where my mother was born when her father was stationed at the railway colony there? My mother has always described it as an “up-country” posting, which I came to understand meant any place north of what was then Bombay. If I knew only that, it seemed certain my children would know even less, and what might their children ask?
I initially assumed Dennis had hunted down these documents himself, perhaps to prove his identity as a rightful beneficiary of the inheritance that New York Uncle Crooks had tried to leave him. But I noticed small print at the bottom of each document certifying they were true duplicates of original records requested between the fifteenth and twenty-third of May 1947—three months before India became an independent nation; less than three weeks before the British government accepted the Mountbatten Plan and carved up the subcontinent into states of chaos and slaughter. My grandfather must have scrambled to assemble these copies with a growing sense of urgency, requesting them all in a span of nine days, assuming they would paper his way to Jamaica. He must have passed them down to Dennis. I wondered if he had left any files to my grandmother or whether she had kept any of the papers from his old study back in England. My f
ather had helped her apply for her British pension, filed her tax returns and acted as a co-executor of her will, and he once mentioned that he’d come across my grandmother’s address book and wondered if it contained anything useful. It was time to find out.
A week later, Mum, Dad, Jade and I marched down to my parents’ basement. Thirty years ago it was the heart of all our house parties: a sprawling hardwood floor for dancing, a stone fireplace, a Formica-topped bar. An old wicker-bottomed bottle of Madeira still dangles on the wall, obscuring a gift my father received from an Indonesian client: a painting on black velvet of a topless redhead with impossibly large eyes.
As Jade explored the adjoining crawl space, I sat on the bottom step, watching as my father searched through his filing cabinets.
“I think I may have put it in here,” he was saying.
“It’s the address book you’re after?” Mum asked.
“Well, yes,” I said, “but anything that might help, really.”
Mum disappeared up the basement stairs. I didn’t expect to see her back for a while. My mother is more of a hider than a filer, more likely to wrap an Important Thing in a handkerchief and tuck it between two cardigans than slip it into a labelled envelope. But she reappeared just a few minutes later, triumphantly waving a small gold address book.
I leafed through the pages alphabetically until I got to the Cs. Most of the entries had been written in the large, even print of my mother’s younger sister Doris. The first page of C entries included the addresses and numbers of all my uncles, complete with honorifics and initials and in descending birth order: Mr. O.T. Crooks, Kent, UK; Mr. T.A. Crooks, Surrey, UK; Mr. D.M. Crooks, Ontario, Canada … No one would guess from the formality of it that these were my grandmother’s children.
I turned the page, expecting more familiar names, but the very first lines contained an entry for a Mrs. Clare Crooks, 492 Hancock Street, Brooklyn 33, New York, U.S.A. It was the address to which Dennis and my mother had once corresponded. I had looked it up through old New York property records kept online and found that a Frederick Augustus Crooks had once owned it. I assumed he was the mystery uncle, and from what I could tell he had run a successful real estate business in New York. I also found his death registration in 1969, the same year Dennis had been contacted about his will. It had listed his birthdate as 1893—twenty years younger than the Captain and so, perhaps, a nephew. Interestingly, it mentioned that he had died in Central America. When I phoned the number listed for 492 Hancock Street, an older woman with a thick Southern drawl answered and told me she recalled that Crookses had once lived there. But not for a very, very long time, she said, and that was all she knew.
Three entries below the Hancock address in my grandmother’s book, the last one on the page, was yet another address for Mrs. Clare Crooks. Except this one was in Jamaica: 16 Sheriton Park Crescent in Kingston, no phone number. I was gobsmacked. Nana had an address for the Crooks family in Jamaica? She knew the family in Jamaica? Had she communicated with them? Why had she never mentioned it?
I pointed to the entry and passed the book to my mother. She looked at it quizzically and passed it to my father.
“Did you know Nana had this address?” Dad asked.
“No,” Mum said.
“Well, she must have known the family in Jamaica,” I said.
“She must have,” my mother agreed, “but she never said a word.”
“Well, it’s all written in Aunty Doris’s handwriting. Do you think Doris knows anything?” I asked.
“No, I think Doris only copied this for Nana from another book.”
I’d been searching madly for a concrete lead in Jamaica and there it was in my grandmother’s address book—no Q-tip required.
My father poured us all wine and we lazed around the living room that afternoon musing about the secrets my grandmother had kept, marvelling that she had never mentioned she knew the whereabouts of the Crooks family in Jamaica, and why that might have been so. Had their ties broken with Dennis’s legal wrangling? Had my grandfather known them? You’d think Nana might have said something in all those years of Sundays.
At home later that night, with the rest of the house asleep, I flipped through my grandmother’s book again. On the back pages Doris had written the birthdates and anniversaries of all her children and grandchildren. I found only two entries that my grandmother, in a shaky scrawl, had penned herself: a friend she’d met after moving to Canada and my grandfather’s cousin Mervyn Meek, the son of one of Nana Bridget’s brothers—but not Earnest. His name wasn’t in my grandmother’s book. Mum said the last time she had seen Earnest Meek he was standing alone on a pier in Bombay, waving goodbye as their ship sailed for England in 1958.
My father had filled a large manila envelope for me with a few of the other items Nana had left with my parents, including matching leather billfolds my grandfather had purchased for them both, their initials embossed in gold on the front. Inside one was a faded prayer card with a picture of Our Lady of Vailankanni on one side and an act of contrition on the other … O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.… I returned it to the billfold, a mixture of emotions churning heavily in my chest—suspicion, mistrust, guilt. Why hadn’t I asked her more questions?
Another pocket of the billfold held a peeling black-and-white photo of my grandparents standing in the back garden of their house in England. My grandmother is wearing a dark dress with a large floral print, and Papa, looking tall and lanky in a suit jacket and baggy slacks, has his arm around her shoulders. Mum always said people thought he looked like Jimmy Stewart with a good tan. What would Papa have said about all this fuss I was stirring up to find our Jamaican roots?
I turned on the computer and called up the website for telephone directories in Jamaica. Within moments I was scanning the Kingston white pages. There was nearly a full page of Crookses listed. Halfway down I found a Carol E. Crooks living at the address written in my grandmother’s book, 16 Sheriton Park Crescent. After all these years, it was still the home of a Crooks.
The next morning I had a good breakfast and two cups of coffee before I called. I needed to think through the conversation, where I would start.… Oh, hello. One hundred years ago a Captain named Crooks died in Bombay. You didn’t by chance know him, did you?
It is so much simpler to connect with perfect strangers when you share the same pattern of nucleotides. I tried the number several times that afternoon, but an electronic answering machine picked up with every attempt. I tried twice more in the evening. Finally, shortly after nine o’clock, a young woman answered. “Good night,” she said.
This confused me for a moment. “Good night? … Hello?” I said.
“Yes, hello?”
“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for Carol E. Crooks.”
“Yes, that is my mother.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m calling from Toronto, Canada, and looking for some Crooks relatives there. My mother was a Crooks and I found your address in my grandmother’s address book.”
“I think you want to talk to my mother,” the woman said. “Do you want to talk to my mother?”
“Yes, that would be great. I’m trying to find out some information about our Crooks family in Jamaica.”
“I’ll get my mother,” she said.
The phone clunked down on a hard surface and I could hear the woman faintly in the background saying something about Crooks … family … Canada …
An older woman came to the phone. “Good night,” she said.
“Good night,” I replied, probably a bit too cheerfully. I apologized for the late hour and began my explanation again. “My mother’s maiden name is Crooks and I found your address in my grandmother’s address book. The listing is for a Clare Crooks.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know Clare Crooks,” the woman said.
Her Jamaican accent was as thick as molasses. I could barely make out her words until she said, “Gimme some nehms.”
> I started rhyming them off: the Captain’s name, his father’s, his mother’s, the name of the New York Uncle, Frederick Augustus, and his wife, whom I assumed was Clare.
“Well, I know dere was a Frederick and Clare Crooks, I tink, dat used to live here.…” she said. Then she told me she had lived in the house for twenty-seven years, that she was a Crooks only by marriage, and that she was now estranged from her husband, James Crooks. If I wanted to know more about Frederick and Clare, who she thought might now be long dead too, I ought to ask these questions of James Crooks. She suggested that I leave her my number and she would get him to call me. I asked if I might have a number at which to reach him. She said she did not have one. “I see him from time to time,” she said. “But I will tell him ya called.”
“Well, I would be very grateful if you could pass it on to him. He could always call me here collect.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll do dat.”
I hung up, utterly deflated. The Kingston connection seemed to have turned out to be like the address on Hancock Street and a Chinese haplotype—a dead end.
There may be no better remedy for the genealogy blues than the Internet and several uninterrupted watch-the-sun-come-up hours of clicking into the abyss. The sensation that you may be just a link away from pay dirt never leaves you. This must be why family-history hunting can be as addictive as gambling, why it rivals online gaming as one of North America’s top pastimes. Keep plugging your ancestral particulars into the machine and some primitive region of the brain—perhaps a Pavlovian instinct conserved from a day when persistent spear throwing eventually led to dinner—suggests that your numbers will soon come up. One moment I’d be reading about the fancy-pants of Lancashire and the next I was trolling the Crooks discussion boards on Ancestry.com or GenForum.
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