I never met my grandfather, Harris M. Crist. He passed away before I was born and yet he has been a constant part of my Vineyard life. I have strained to learn about him for most of my years — who was he, what was he like, did he have a sense of humor? It is mostly breadcrumbs but it is a start.

My mother was an early source who used to talk about him a lot, but he was not an engaged parent and revealed little to her. He was a newspaper man who, my mother said, loved his job so much he would have done it for free. As such, he had his head buried in a series of evening and morning editions at breakfast every day.

I learned that he was an editor, avid golfer, husband, passionate crusader and Vineyarder. My oldest sister gave him the name Gaga. She had him for 10 years, but by 1946 he was gone — three years before I arrived.

Every time I drive out of Vineyard Haven towards West Chop I pass by his old house at 93 Main street. He and my grandmother, Addie Crist, brought the property in 1936 when he retired after decades of serving as the managing editor and co-owner of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in Brooklyn, N.Y. Prior to that he lived in Washington DC, as the paper’s Washington correspondent. My mother showed me numerous invitations to White House functions he received, delivered by hand, from Presidents Taft, Wilson and Harding.

From sports reporter Harold Parrot’s book, The Lords of Baseball, I learned that he was highly principled and stared down reporters with “blue gimlet eyes that bore into their souls through cool, rimless glasses, leaving them speechless.”

I became a journalist, too, working for a time as the managing editor of World Tennis. This was a much different world than my grandfather’s. I planned issues, developed story and column ideas, and covered Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Unlike him, I hated to yell for missing copy and harp on missed deadlines. But we both passionately loved our jobs.

When I was a teenager, spending summers on the Vineyard, I would run into shopkeepers who remembered my grandfather fondly and usually said something like, “Fine man, good customer.”

More crumbs that fell far short of a meal.

At Grace Church, I noticed a bronze plaque in the entryway saying that the lights hanging from the ceiling in the main body of the church had been purchased by my grandmother, Addie Crist, who was the organist there, and dedicated to my grandfather’s memory. An additional clue, yes, but a crumb nevertheless.

When it came time to retire to the Vineyard, my grandfather built the house at 93 Main street, just past the end of the commercial district that overlooked the Vineyard Haven harbor. A large patch of green cascades down a slight hill from the back patio to the beach.

I’ve seen pictures of my sisters laughing and running down that hill and spilling out onto the sand. I’ve walked that grassy hill but it was years after he and my grandmother had passed away and had sold the property to the Strock family. I could turn and look back at the house and see the balcony outside their bedroom where he would stand with my grandmother, his arm encircling her waist, watching the early morning ferries come and go. A grand residence befitting his stature, the house had five bedrooms and multiple chimneys.

I, too, built a house on the Vineyard. I started building in West Chop, when I was 22, just 2.5 miles away. I wasn’t a carpenter, though, and I smartly hired a magnificent wood worker who did the building based on plans I had painstaking drawn the previous winter. When its second floor was just a series of uncovered rafters, I used to stand on the newly hammered floor with my head in the high branches above the roofline and watch the setting sun glint through the leaves and reflect off the rough-sawn beams. It nearly brought tears to my eyes. I’d say out loud, “Now I know why they call this a cathedral ceiling.”

That was church to me, just as much as the walls and ceiling from which the lights hung at Grace church were to Gaga.

It’s a fragile, tenuous connection, though. I have looked at his photo all my life, his steely eyes, serious frameless glasses, 19th-century coat and tie. But I’ve never heard his voice, never received some journalistic advice or encouragement, never saw him hit a winning golf ball at the Oak Bluffs Country Club (now Farm Neck) where he played “everyday there wasn’t snow on the ground.”

I want to make that connection because I see so much of myself in him. I want him to see himself in me. I want him to say, “You’re carrying on the family legacy. You’re a good writer just like I was.”

But that will never happen. Instead, I visit my grandfather’s grave at our family plot in the cemetery on State Road in Vineyard Haven and try to find connection there. He is buried there with my mother and father, and a few other family members. I will join them eventually. But in the meantime, I will keep looking for signs that my grandfather was here, on the Island, just like I am.

David Lott lives in Vineyard Haven.