Every family has a story of how they came to be where they are.

For the Knowles, Lariz, and Garcia families, those stories begin on islands separated from Key West by stretches of blue water. One branch came from the Bahamas. Others came from Cuba. Generation after generation, they crossed those waters, built new lives, raised families, endured hardship, and became part of the history of Key West.

Those journeys are the heart of my book, Crossings: A History of the Knowles, Lariz, Garcia Family.

Purchase here.

More Than Names and Dates

Genealogy often begins with names, dates, birth certificates, marriage records, census entries, and death certificates.

But somewhere along the way, something changes. The people in those records begin to become real. They were people who fell in love, lost parents and spouses, left familiar homes, boarded ships, raised children, worked long days, celebrated weddings, mourned deaths, and made decisions that ultimately shaped the lives of descendants they would never meet.

That is the story I wanted to tell in Crossings.

The book follows generations of the Knowles family from the Bahamas to Key West and the Garcia and Lariz families from Cuba to Key West. Through biographies, family photographs, historical documents, genealogical research, and family stories, it explores the lives behind the family tree.

These were not simply ancestors. They were people living through their own uncertain times, making choices that would ripple through generations.

Three Families. Two Homelands. Generations of Crossings.

The title Crossings represents far more than geographic movement.

Yes, there were literal crossings across the waters between the Bahamas, Cuba, and the Florida Keys.

But there were other crossings as well. There were crossings from one country to another. From one generation to the next. From old traditions into new lives. From remembered stories into written history. And, perhaps most importantly, from family memory into something that can now be preserved for future generations.

Migration shaped these families, but so did marriage, hardship, opportunity, perseverance, and the determination to create a life in a new place while holding onto pieces of the world they had left behind.

Their individual stories eventually converged in Key West, a city whose history has always been shaped by people arriving from somewhere else.

A Family History Built From Years of Research

This book grew from years of genealogical research—not only mine, but also the research of my aunt, Jane Garcia Rowland.

One of the moments that ultimately became especially important to the book occurred in June 2019. My sister Mona and I traveled to Charleston to meet with Aunt Jane and our mother, Josephine Garcia Simmons, Jane’s sister.

For three days, we sat together in a hotel room and recorded them talking about growing up in Key West. We videotaped their conversations. We went through family photographs. We listened to their memories.

The sisters argued back and forth over details, laughed together, and sometimes cried. Those hours became something far more valuable than I realized at the time. We were preserving family history.

Many of the photographs included in Crossings are photographs we examined together during those days, accompanied by the stories Jane and Josephine remembered about the people pictured in them.

Today, I am profoundly grateful that we took the time to record those conversations. Because family memories disappear much faster than we imagine.

Why I Wrote Crossings

Originally, I imagined this project becoming something similar to my earlier family-history book, Lostmans Heritage: Pioneers in Florida’s Everglades.

But that book took nearly thirty years to research and write. Eventually I realized something important. The goal did not have to be creating the perfect family history. The goal was preserving the history.

I wanted the research gathered in one place. I wanted the photographs preserved together. I wanted Aunt Jane’s research saved. I wanted my mother’s memories saved.

And most of all, I wanted future generations to know something about the people whose lives made their own lives possible.

That became Crossings.

An Expanded Second Edition

The Second Edition of Crossings goes even further.

Many of the original biographies have been rewritten as fuller narratives, allowing the lives of these ancestors to unfold with more context and detail.

The new edition also contains restored photographs, newly added photographs, additional family information, and discoveries made through continuing genealogical research.

Rather than simply documenting the family tree, I wanted readers to feel as though they were meeting the people within it.

Because family history becomes much more meaningful when we stop seeing ancestors as names on a chart and begin imagining the lives they actually lived.

A Story of Key West, Too

Although Crossings is a family history, it is also part of the larger story of Key West.

For generations, people arrived in the Florida Keys from the Bahamas and Cuba. They brought languages, traditions, occupations, foodways, religious practices, family customs, and memories with them.

Their stories became woven into the culture of the island. The Knowles, Lariz, and Garcia families were part of that movement. Their personal history reflects something much larger: the story of a community created through migration and cultural exchange.

For readers interested in Key West history, Bahamian migration, Cuban-American history, genealogy, or the preservation of family stories, Crossings offers a glimpse into that history through the lives of one extended family.

Perhaps Your Family Has a Crossing Story, Too

One of the unexpected gifts of researching family history is discovering how extraordinary ordinary lives can be. Most of our ancestors never imagined that someone generations later would search for their records, study their photographs, or wonder about the choices they made.

They were simply living. And yet their decisions created the paths that eventually led to us.

That is what Crossings is ultimately about. Movement. Memory. Family. And the fragile thread connecting one generation to another.

If you have ever wondered where your family came from, wished you had asked an older relative one more question, spent hours studying an old photograph, or felt the thrill of discovering an ancestor in a historical record, you will understand the reason this book was written.

Crossings: A History of the Knowles, Lariz, Garcia Family preserves the journeys of three families whose paths stretched from the Bahamas and Cuba across the waters to Key West.

Their crossings ended. Their stories did not.

Crossings: A History of the Knowles, Lariz, Garcia Family
By Karen Yvonne Hamilton

Three families. Two homelands. Generations of crossings that led to Key West.

If you love family history, genealogy, Key West history, or stories about the people whose lives came before our own, I invite you to discover their story in Crossings.

Purchase here.