Sometimes when you absent-mindedly make a wish, the universe
just happens to be eavesdropping. And before you know it, a series
of wonderful coincidences are set in motion leading to the
not-so-accidental fulfillment of your desire.
This extraordinary situation happened to me earlier this
year.
Sometimes when you absent-mindedly make a wish, the universe just happens to be eavesdropping. And before you know it, a series of wonderful coincidences are set in motion leading to the not-so-accidental fulfillment of your desire.
This extraordinary situation happened to me earlier this year.
You might recall a column I wrote headlined: “Grandpa’s Suitcase Carries the Treasure of History.” It was published on Jan. 9, and it told the tale of an old beat-up bit of luggage. My grandfather, Daniel Cheek, used that suitcase to hold family letters, postcards, photos and assorted documents and mementoes.
Shortly after writing that column, I stopped one breezy afternoon at Hollister’s I.O.O.F. Cemetery to pay my respects to deceased family members. My father had written a book titled “The Frontier Trail” about the Hortons, the folks on his mother’s side of the family, so I knew a lot about them. The Cheek side of the story, however, was a complete blank to me.
As I stared down at my grandfather’s gravestone, this thought drifted through my mind: “I wish I knew more about the Cheek family history.” It was just a fleeting notion – a simple fancy that vanished in a couple of seconds. I thought nothing more about my casual wish. But the universe, I soon learned, had been eavesdropping.
Two weeks later, then-Gilroy Dispatch city editor Jodi Engle called to say a man named Jeff Williams in Plymouth, Mich. urgently needed to talk to me.
As I dialed his phone number, I winced with anxious imaginings.
Had I unintentionally offended him somehow? Was he a lawyer? Did his client think I wrote something libelous?
Jeff, I soon found out, is a very nice man. He’d served as vice president and a corporate controller at a computer company, and had taken a sabbatical to research and write an extensive history on his mom’s side of the family – the Cheeks. In a quest for photographs, Jeff had done a Google.com search for “Cheek photos.” Google brought up the newspaper column about Daniel Cheek’s suitcase. That’s how Jeff found me.
Jeff had all the Cheek ancestry information up to John Nicholas Cheek, my great grandfather. After that point, the trail along that family branch went cold for the historian.
I, however, had all the details back to Daniel, but nothing beyond my grandpa. I felt thrilled speaking to someone with knowledge of my progenitors.
Via long-distance calls and E-mails, I filled Jeff in on the missing pieces of the puzzle. I also mailed him old photos of Daniel and my father Raymond Cheek.
In September, I found a very heavy package UPS left on my doorstep. The box contained the first edition of “The Cheek Family Chronicles” – 1,104 pages of a beautifully bound hardback volume describing in great detail 700 years of my family’s history. Jeff had done an astoundingly far-reaching amount of research. More than 8,600 individuals born into the Cheek family are described, and Jeff vividly tells their personal stories.
I felt a bursting pride discovering my family name is derived from an English nobleman called Hugh de Cheke-on-the-Hill. He was the Lord of Osbourne Manor at the end of the 1200’s.
Seems he got his name because he possessed an exceptionally large jaw (“cheke” is the old English spelling of “cheek.”)
Hugh settled on the Isle of Wight off England’s southern coast. Over the centuries, his descendants grew influential on that wind-swept island. Today, the Cheek family estate – called Mottistone Manor – is cared for by the British National Trust.
Jeff Williams’ book introduced me to a most extraordinary close kin – Sir John Cheke of Mottistone. He was the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge in the early 1500s during the reign of Henry VIII. He served as the tutor to the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VI) as well as Elizabeth I. Sir John’s sister Mary Cheke married Sir William Cecil Lord Burleigh – famous in history as Queen Elizabeth I’s influential Prime Minister.
There’s a chance the great playwright William Shakespeare might have known my well-connected kinsman. It’s suggested the pompous character Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the comedy “Twelfth Night” might have been based on the scholarly Sir John Cheke.
The Cheeks came to the New World in the early 1600s. A Sir Hatton Cheeke was awarded land in America under a provision of the Second Virginia Charter on May 23, 1609. Unfortunately, in November 1610, Hatton died in a duel. (Those violent Cheeks!)
His brother Sir Thomas Cheeke became heir to Hatton’s Virginia Colony land.
Pompous vanity – a notorious Cheek family trait, apparently – leads me now to name drop some notable relations of mine:
nJoel Owsley Cheek (the founder of Maxwell House Coffee)
nUnited States Navy Rear Admiral Marion Case Cheek (who, at the end of World War II, stood on board the USS Missouri near General Douglas MacArthur and witnessed Japan’s surrender)
nTom Cheek (a radio announcer known as the “Voice of the Toronto Blue Jays” baseball team)
nMolly Cheek (a film actress who played “Jim’s mom” in the 1999 teenage sex-comedy “American Pie” and its sequels).
But the vast majority of the “Cheek Family Chronicles” is devoted to telling the stories of the not-so-famous folks.
Printed on pages 185-186, is the South Valley newspaper column about my grandpa’s suitcase. Displayed over it is a photo of Daniel and, as a young boy, my father. They’re resting together on the running board of an old Model T horseless carriage. We Cheeks are simple, honest and ordinary.
Through Jeff Williams’s book, my absent-minded wish at the I.O.O.F. cemetery was granted beyond my wildest dreams.
His “Chronicles” indeed has blessed me with a greater understanding of the human beings with whom I share a family name.
