George Crookshank (1732-1797)

He was born on the Island of Hoy in the Scottish Orkney Islands where his father had fled from Aberdeenshire after the Jacobite Rebellion, 1715. Coming to New York City, he was the Captain and owner of the Drake, a 70-ton merchant vessel that ran from New York between Philadelphia, Boston, and Europe. He was a Loyalist, and after his wife died in 1776 he moved to her native New Jersey (first to Shrewsbury then to Red Bank, Monmouth County) where in 1779 he was a signatory to the Articles of Retaliation. But, after the British were defeated, he moved his family to Saint John, New Brunswick, where he continued as a merchant with his sister's husband, John Colville. Nonetheless he maintained both business and familial ties with the United States and when he died at Saint John his death was reported in the New York Gazette. His wife was from a prominent family in Monmouth County and they had five children.