The Juggler's Children

by Carolyn Abraham

  Despite the demands of their own schedules, my sister and her husband, Christine and George Clutterbuck, looked after my daughter so I could travel in India and Jamaica. Christine has been my safety net throughout, incomparable sounding board and booster. My brother Conrad Abraham inspires me in more ways than he will ever know, and my brother Kevin Abraham has always supported my work, even as he asks the hard questions.

  My nieces and nephews, Shayna, Katelyn, Kari and Jared, let me know that they were curious too, and Christopher Clutterbuck gave up a hunk of summer to transcribe miles of tape on my behalf. My niece, Candice Abraham, hooked me up with Troy, but I am most thankful for her big heart, her reading and our long talks about writing.

  I owe special gratitude to my uncles and aunts, who gave when I asked, Dennis and Merlyn Crooks, Basil and Norma Crooks, and Charles Crooks, and all their families.

  My newfound genetic relatives made this book better with their willingness to share. Thanks to Paul Crooks for saying yes and writing Ancestors, the novel that pointed the way to the cove. Thanks to Denis Grigoriev, Longtang John Lin, Jim List and Melvyn Lomax.

  In the United States, I learned from the family quests of others, Roberta Estes, Bennett Greenspan, who always made time to answer my questions, and Adrian Williams.

  Ron Forbes, president of the Anglo-Indian Association of Canada, treated me to his valuable perspectives and an afternoon in the sanctuary of his lovely garden.

  Many friends and relatives offered encouragement in various forms over the years: Doreen Abraham, Sheri-Levy Abraham, Brigitte Audet-Martin, Shireen Bennett, Ellen Braganca, Clive Crooks, Simone Crooks, Erin Elder, Colin Embree, Clive Harris, Supriya James, Caroline Mallan, Karin McGeoch, Karen McNeil, Stephen Northfield, Ralph Pereira, Lisa Priest, Derek Raymaker and Christine Reymer.

  Jeanette Rouse, my mother-in-law, who caught the genealogy bug long before the Internet debuted, provided helpful hints along with her well wishes.

  Kim Honey, who has more than a bit of science in her soul, helped push me to the finish line, reading and listening for years—and often late into the night. To Darren Fryer, who read several drafts of this work, and provided important suggestions from start to finish, my gratitude runs deeper than a tea root.

  Editors of the Globe and Mail, John Stackhouse and Sylvia Stead, afforded me the time to work on this project, and Edward Greenspon backed it in its earliest days.

  My agent, Dean Cooke, along with Suzanne Brandreth, championed this project from its genesis and, with care, helped bring it home.

  Strange things happened during the writing of this book. Tree roots erupted out of the basement floor. The house flooded—twice. There were a few rounds of pestilence, and then came a baby out of the bulrushes to shake up the hierarchy of demands. But Anne Collins, publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, who believed in this book from the outset, never gave up on it. I owe a great debt to her faith and near-biblical patience, her cheerful wit, even as she cracked the whip, and the keen eye she brought to this project.

  Wrestling the first draft of this book down to a length that didn’t compete with the Bible took the support of a brave editor. The skill, thoughtfulness and good humour of Craig Pyette were gifts to me on every page. Copy editor Gillian Watts also brought an unwavering eye to each word.

  As I worked away on this book about family, my own family had to do without me on many days and nights. They never let me dwell on that irony. Jade and Jackson are my very best teachers. Stephen Rouse lived this journey too, filmed, photographed, helped with research, read, re-read and still props me up in all the ways that matter. Words cannot express what their unconditional support, sacrifice and love have meant to me through these years.

  SOURCE NOTES

  All genetic tests conducted for inclusion in this book were provided by private companies at regular cost and were paid by me as a customer of both Family Tree DNA and the now defunct DNAPrint Genomics. This includes tests for those who agreed to be tested, or have further testing done, at my request. For tests performed on my parents and myself by Mark Shriver and his lab team at Penn State, I covered fees related to running the 10,000 marker chip test in development, and analysis of the results.

  The following is a select bibliography of books, academic studies, articles and websites. In many cases, I have cited sources directly in the text, particularly as it relates to documents, and private correspondence accessed through the subscription-based archive found at Jamaicanfamilysearch​.com.

  I wrote this book as events unfolded over the years, and in some cases, the science has evolved. Where relevant, I have noted these advances below the particular journal reference.

  BOOKS

  Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810. London: Macmillan, 1975.

  Bayer, Jennifer Marie. A Sociolinguistic Investigation of the English Spoken by the Anglo-Indians of Mysore City. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages, 1986.

  Bristow, Sir Robert Charles. Cochin Saga: a history of foreign government and business adventures in Kerala, South India by Arabs, Romans, Venetians, Dutch and British, together with a Personal Narrative of the Last Adventurer and an Epilogue. London: Cassell, 1959.

  Burton, Richard F. Goa and the Blue Mountains; Or, Six Months of Sick Leave. London: Samuel Bentley and Company, 1851.

  Caplan, Lionel. Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World. United Kingdom: Berg, 2001.

  Collins, Larry and Dominique Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976.

  Crooks, Paul. Ancestors. London: Arcadia Books, 2002.

  Danvers, Frederick Charles. The Portuguese in India. New York: Octagon Books, 1966.

  D’Cruz, Glenn. Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Postcolonial Literature. Bern: Peter Lang A.G., International Academic Publishers, 2006. (It was D’Cruz who made the front page of the Times of India in 1998 when a reporter covering the Anglo-Indian gathering in Bangalore learned he did not know how to jive.)

  Devine, T.M. Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815. London: Allen Lane, 2003.

  Evolution: A Scientific American Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

  Gaikwad, V.R. The Anglo-Indians: a study in the problems and processes involved in emotional and cultural integration. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967.

  Gupta, Shiva Kumar. Marriage Among the Anglo-Indians. Lucknow: Ethnographic and Folk Culture Society, 1968.

  Hart, Henry H. The Sea Road to the Indies. New York: MacMillan Company, 1950.

  Hawes, Christopher J. Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773–1833. England: Curzon Press, 1996.

  Heuman, Gad J. Between Black and White: Race Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981.

  Hudson, J.B., J. Durairaj and N. Muraleedharam. Guidelines on Tea Culture in South India. New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2002.

  Humble, Richard. The Explorers. Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1978.

  Jones, Steve. Y: The Descent of Man. London: Abacus, 2002.

  Keay, John. A History of India. London: HarperCollins, 2000.

  Kennedy, Dane. The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. California: University of California Press, 1996.

  Kennet, Debbie. DNA and Social Networking: A Guide to Genealogy in the Twenty-first Century. Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011.

  King, Liet. Colonel W. Ross. The Aboriginal tribes of the Nilgiri Hills. London: Longmans Green and Co., 1870.

  Lach, Donald F. and Edwin J. Van Kley. Asia in the Making of Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

  Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995.

  Ogilvie, Daniel. The History of Trelawny. Kingston: United Printers, 1954.

  Pereira, Ralph. ONE HOUSE — TWO WORLDS: The deCouto-Pereira Family History. Ottawa: Gilmore Doculink International, 2002.

  Rav
enstein, E.G., ed. A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Originally published 1898)

  Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

  Saxon, Lyle, Fabulous New Orleans. Louisiana: Pelican Publishing, 1988. (Originally published 1928)

  Sherrow, Victoria. Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006.

  Singh, Khushwant. India: An Introduction. New Delhi: Vision Books, 1990.

  Singh, Rama S., “The Indian Caste System, Human Diversity, and Genetic Determinism.” In Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives, Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

  Spear, Percival. A History of India: Vol. II, From the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.

  Thapar, Romila. A History of India: Vol. I. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990.

  The Gleaner History of Books. Kingston: The Gleaner Company, 1995.

  Wells, Spencer. Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project. Washington: National Geographic, 2006.

  Younger, Coralie. Anglo-Indians: Neglected Children of the Raj. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1987.

  STUDIES

  Akinboro, A. et al, “Frequency of Twinning in Southwest Nigeria.” Indian Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 14, May 2008.

  Balaresque, P. et al, “A predominantly neolithic origin for European paternal lineages.” PLoS biology, Vol. 8, Jan. 19, 2010.

  Bamshad, M.J. et al, “Female gene flow stratifies Hindu castes.” Nature, Vol. 395, October 1998.

  Chaix, Raphaëlle et al, “The Genetic or Mythical Ancestry of Descent Groups: Lessons from the Y Chromosome.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 75, December 2004.

  Chakravarti, Aravinda, “Tracing India’s invisible threads.” Nature, Vol. 461, Sept. 24, 2009.

  Foster, E.A., et al, “Jefferson fathered slave’s last child.” Nature, Vol. 396, Nov. 5, 1998.

  Gresham, David et al, “Origins and Divergence of the Roma (Gypsies).” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 69, December 2001.

  Hammer, Michael F. et al, “Extended Y chromosome haplotypes resolve multiple and unique lineages of the Jewish priesthood.” Human Genetics, Vol. 126, November 2009. (Further testing of Cohen Y chromosomes reveals kohenim men descend from several unrelated paternal lines, rather than one single paternal root. By testing more markers, the researchers found that not all, but roughly 30 per cent, of Kohen men carry a genetic Y-DNA signature indicative of a paternal origin in the Near East reaching back some 3,000 years to the time of Aaron.)

  Hughes, J.F. et al, “Chimpanzee and human Y chromosome are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content.” Nature, Vol. 463, Jan. 28, 2010.

  Hughes, J.F. et al, “Strict evolutionary conservation followed rapid gene loss on human and rhesus Y chromosomes.” Nature, Vol. 483, Feb. 22, 2012.

  (Recent paper demonstrating that the Y chromosome’s methods of preserving its code have held steady for the last 25 million years, when rhesus macaques are estimated to have diverged from humans.)

  Jobling M.A., “In the name of the father: surnames and genetics.” Trends in Genetics, Vol. 17, June 2001.

  Kalaydijeva, L. et al, “A newly discovered founder population: the Roma/Gypsies.” Bioessays, Vol. 27, October 2005.

  King, T.E. et al, “Genetic signature of coancestry within surnames.” Current Biology, Vol. 16, Feb. 21, 2006.

  King, T.E. et al, “Africans in Yorkshire? The deepest-rooting clade of the Y phylogeny within an English genealogy.” European Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 15, March 2007.

  King, T.E. et al, “Thomas Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs to a rare European lineage.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 132, April 2007.

  King, T. E, and Jobling M. A., “What’s in a name? Y chromosomes, surnames and the genetic genealogy revolution.” Trends in Genetics, Vol. 25, August 2009.

  Moore, L.T. et al, “A Y-chromosome signature of hegemony in Gaelic Ireland.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 78, February 2006.

  Myres, Natalie M. et al, “A major Y chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe.” European Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 19, January 2011.

  (One of several recent studies presenting evidence that R1b, Western Europe’s most common Y haplogroup, is much younger than previously estimated, emerging 10,000 years before present, or less, perhaps as farming spread to Europe from the Middle East.)

  Reich, David et al, “Reconstructing Indian population history.” Nature, Vol. 461, Sept. 24, 2009.

  Rootsi, Siiri et al, “A counter-clockwise northern route of the Y-chromosome haplogroup N from Southeast Asia towards Europe.” European Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 15, December 2006.

  Sharma, S. et al, “The Indian origin of paternal haplogroup R1a1 substantiates the autochthonous origin of Brahmins and the caste system.” Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 54, January 2009.

  Shi, H. et al, “Y chromosome evidence of southern origin of the East Asian specific haplogroup O3 — M122.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 77, September 2005.

  Shriver, Mark D. and Rick A. Kittles, “Genetic ancestry and the search for personalized genetic histories.” Nature Reviews, Vol. 5, August 2004.

  Skaletsky, Helen et al, “The male-specific region of human Y chromosome is a mosaic of discrete sequence classes.” Nature, Vol. 423, June 2003.

  Skorecki, K. et al “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests.” Nature, Vol. 385, Jan. 2, 1997.

  Sykes B., and C. Irven, “Surnames and the Y Chromosome.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 66, April 2000.

  Thanseem, I. et al, “Genetic affinities among the lower castes and tribal groups of India: inference from Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA.” BioMed Central Genetics, Vol. 7, August 2006.

  Tharakan, C. George, “The Mixed Economy of the South Indian Kurumbas.” Ethnology, Vol. 42, Oct. 1, 2003.

  Thomas, M.G. et al, “Y chromosomes traveling south: the cohen modal haplotype and the origins of the Lemba — the “Black Jews of Southern Africa.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 66, February 2000.

  Trumme, T. et al, “Genetics in genealogical research, reconstruction of a family tree by means of Y-haplotyping.” Journal of Biological and Clinical Anthropology (Anthropologischer Anzeiger), Vol. 62, December 2004.

  Underhill, P.A., “Y chromosome sequence variation and the history of human populations.” Nature Genetics, Vol. 26, November 2000.

  Wilder, J.A., et al, “Global patterns of human mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome structure are not influenced by higher migration rates of females versus males.” Nature Genetics, Vol. 36, October 2004.

  Xue, Y. et al, “Recent spread of a Y-chromosomal lineage in northern China and Mongolia.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 77, December 2008.

  Zerjal, T. et al, “The genetic legacy of the Mongols.” American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 72, March 2003.

  ARTICLES and ESSAYS

  Allan, David G. “Jamaica’s Golden Age.” The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008.

  Baumeister, Roy F. “Is There Anything Good About Men?” Full media transcript address to American Psychological Association, August 2007.

  Bielenberg, Kim, “So, that’s why we love kebabs.” Irish Independent, Feb. 6, 2010.

  Cyranoski, David, “China bioscience: The sequence factory.” Nature, Vol. 464, March 3, 2010.

  Frudakis, Tony N., “Powerful but Requiring Caution: Genetic Tests of Ancestral Origins.” National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Vol. 93, 2005.

  Gonzales, Juan, “Puerto Rican Gene Pool Runs Deep.” New York Daily News, Nov. 4, 2003.

  “Genetic ailments due to endogamy.” The Times of India, Sept. 25, 2009.

  Harris, Paul, “Society: The genes that build America.” The Observer, July 15, 2007.

  Hot
z, Robert Lee, “DNA Study shows Jefferson Fathered His Slave’s Child.” The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1, 1998.

  McGowan, Kathleen, “DNA could help unlock origin of Melungeons.” Discover Magazine, April 30, 2003.

  McKie, Robin, “A Scientific Milestone: Meet the DNA genius who fears the dark side of his discovery: Twenty years on from his first DNA testing, Professor Alec Jeffreys says that, despite its real benefits, genetic technology can destroy our civil liberties.” The Observer, Aug. 8, 2004.

  “More women than men have kids, more female ancestors in the tree: Evolutionary Biology; Genes expose secrets of sex on the side.” Genomics and Genetics Weekly, Oct. 15, 2004.

  Nicol, Mark, and Ross Slater, “I’ve just been told I’m an African Warrior … and my friends at the Bowls Club are astonished.” The Mail on Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007.

  Olson, Steve, “The Royal We.” The Atlantic, May 2002.

  Ramachandran, R. “The genetics of caste.” Frontline (India’s National Magazine), Vol. 18, June 9, 2001.

  Robson, David, “How do you apologise for your distant slave trading ancestor?” Daily Express, June 24, 2006.

  Rutherford, Adam, “India’s genes uncovered.” The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2009.

  “Study gives insight into ancestral population of India.” The Times of India, Sept. 29, 2009.

  Thomson, Ian, “Gangster’s paradise.” The Independent On Sunday, May, 10, 2009.

  Wade, Nicholas, “In Caste System, Women Can Marry Up.” The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1998.

  Younge, Gary, “The desire for identity.” The Sun-Herald, Feb. 26, 2006.

  Trevor, B. and K. Morgan, “The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788.” Featured in “New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade” a special issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 58, January 2001.

  WEBSITES

  “Anglo-Indian of the G.I.P. Railway at Poona: application to Lord Clydesmuir for free passages for self and family to Jamaica, Feb. 1948–Apr. 1948,” reference located at The National Archives online, File 7237/48. http://www.nationalarchives​.gov.​uk/a2a/​records.aspx?​cat=059​-lpj7_12027-​15831&cid=1-​1-551-​1189#1​-1-551-1189