AncestryTalks with Paul Crooks

Paul Crooks is a trailblazing genealogist and published author with a specialist interest in Black ancestry. He pioneered Black genealogy research in the 1990s, tracing his African Caribbean family history from London back six generations — to ancestors enslaved on a sugar plantation in North America 200 years ago, and further still to forebears on the Gold Coast of West Africa.

Paul gained national recognition with his acclaimed historical novel Ancestors, based on his family’s story, and he appeared as an expert on Black British genealogy on Who Do You Think You Are? with Moira Stuart. His second book, A Tree Without Roots, is regarded as a seminal guide to tracing Black British ancestry.

Paul is credited with inspiring an upsurge of interest in Black and British genealogy and is recognised as having sparked a movement in African Caribbean family history research, linking generations separated by slavery and reconnecting people of African descent with their ancestral heritage.