Amy C Crooks writes historical fiction rooted in twenty-one years of real genealogical research — records, DNA, and a stubborn refusal to leave a mystery unsolved.
It started almost by accident. Pregnant with her third child, Amy did the math on her paycheck against daycare and gas money and quit her job — something she’d never done before in her life. Bored and restless, she was watching an old rerun of Little House on the Prairie when she found herself wondering what was true in Laura Ingalls’s story and what wasn’t. She got on the computer to find out, and somewhere in the process, started digging into her own family instead.
That was the beginning. Amy built a family tree on Ancestry.com, made every beginner mistake there is to make, and kept going anyway. Over the next two decades, one tree became several — her own family, her husband’s family, her best friend’s, and many others.
Then 2008 hit, and the research had to share time with a paycheck again. Amy went back to work in manufacturing for the next eight years, until the plant she worked at closed. Her husband, who’d watched how much she loved the research and the writing, encouraged her to turn that unexpected opening into something more — so at forty, Amy went back to school and earned her paralegal degree, then moved into law firm work. Today she’s a paralegal and project manager for a settlement administration company based in Philadelphia, still working from her home in north Idaho. Through all of it, the genealogy research never stopped — it just moved to nights and weekends, where it’s stayed ever since.
In 2024, Amy published her first two books: The Last Wagon, a nonfiction account of her Romani ancestors — a heritage her own family had hidden so well she didn’t know it existed until she went looking — and His Greatest Regret, a novel built on decades of research into her third great-grandfather, Richard Woolsey, and the son he left behind.
From there came the Pack Saddle Ranch series, set during the Great Depression in north Idaho, where Amy has lived for almost thirty years. With America’s 250th anniversary on the horizon, Amy began a search for a Patriot ancestor in her family tree. This quest led her to the Beesons, a Quaker family who opposed both war and slavery. Among them, she found Edward Beeson, her Patriot ancestor for the Daughters of the American Revolution. He fought under Colonel Dugan’s militia, marched to Charleston during the Revolution, and then, in a turn Amy has always acknowledged, became a slave owner himself. This very contradiction forms the core of Fading Light, the first book in the Beeson Family Saga. The story unfolds through the experiences of the women who sustained the family: Edward’s mother, Elizabeth, and later, his second wife, Ann Pennington.
Amy is already at work on Book Two, which follows Edward’s son, Curtis Beeson — her third great-grandfather — through the consequences of the wealth his family built on slavery, and the poverty he died in after losing everything he couldn’t legally prove was his in Georgia following the Civil War.
Genealogy research runs through everything Amy writes — traditional records work alongside DNA/genetic genealogy, chasing down family stories the way she chased down her own grandmother’s memory of a distant connection to Daniel Boone, half-remembered from a family book lost in a house fire. She found it. It wasn’t a direct line, as it turned out — more a marriage connecting to a marriage — but it was real, and it was there.
By day, Amy works as a paralegal. By night and on weekends, she researches and writes every historical journey she shares with readers — real names, real places, and the gaps history left behind, filled in with care.