FINDING MY ANCESTORS
Paul Crooks

I was born in London to Jamaican parents and I often wondered whether it was possible to trace my African ancestors. The thought of raiding several archives, with no guarantee of success, was to put it lightly – daunting!

When I was 21 my father recommended I read Blacks in Bondage, the first volume of Richard Hart's Slaves Who Abolished Slavery. The book gave accounts of the slaves' suffering at the hands of their slave owners. I was intrigued to find out where Hart had got hold of these accounts. I noted the sources at the back of the book and was particularly interested in the archives that were easily accessible in England. From this reading I realized that Jamaica was important to the development of the British Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I was surprised to find that the British Colonial Office kept extremely good records of those who inhabited the British West Indies. The wealth of stored information about neglected historical events astonished me.

I spent thirteen years raiding archives and repositories in London (in particular The Public Records Office and Family History Centre) and Jamaica (The National Library of Jamaica). I discovered two ancestors. Ami Djaba, one of my great-great-great-great-grandmothers, and John Alexander Crooks, one of my great-great-great-grandfathers. They were both born in Africa and were transported as slaves to labour on a Jamaican sugar plantation almost two hundred years ago. They lived during the time when 20,000 slaves erupted into civil unrest. This great freedom movement became known as the Baptist War, and it precipitated the ending of slavery in the British West Indies. When it was over, John Alexander Crooks uprooted his family and headed for the hills to begin a new life. I wanted to find out why.

I set about piecing together a chronology, using the fragmentary information I had collected: names; dates; and places. There were other fragments gathered from the slave registers of 1817 to 1833. I identified blood relation-ships, and overlaid this information with what I learnt about the undercurrent of social and economic discontent that swept through slave communities in the British West Indies before emancipation. This included a number of sessions in the reading room of the British Library in London. Some of the anecdotes from books I read gave me intriguing insights into plantation society; I also came across documented conversations between slave and master. This increased my understanding of the frustration my forebears must have felt about the social injustice they suffered, and of people's courageous efforts to overcome their arduous existence.

I next attempted to reconstruct my family's pre-emancipation history so that I could add something to the story of the people who came out of Africa and the Caribbean. I wanted to do this in a way that would be accessible to anyone interested in genealogy. The result of my effort is Ancestors.

Researching my family history enabled me to improve my interviewing and listening skills; particularly in early attempts to extract information from older family members – not the easiest thing! I also improved my ability to develop and maintain some important contacts within a range of organizations and institutions. But my advice to anyone thinking of researching their roots is to talk to the older members of the family.

"When you lose and older person, you loose a book"