Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Family ties
Searching for answers, connections and family roots
It’s no secret that all families have their own stories, and characters, too.
For example, my dad used to say that when he was in the army during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he and the other paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division were shipped down to Florida and had to sleep on an airbase runway, under their planes, in order to be ready to invade Cuba as soon as John F. Kennedy said the word.
Now, this story might be apocryphal, but it’s become part of our family lore. But, in order to have such lore as part of your family, you need to have a family to be the source of such tales.
And this search for the source of family was why my wife, daughters and I spent a day driving around the Big Island of Hawaii on a quest to find my wife’s roots.
You see, my wife, Megan, was adopted. And as is the case with many children who are adopted, Megan has always wanted to know where, and who, she was from. About 14 years ago, she found her birth parents — who
never married or stayed together — and has developed good relationships with both of them.
As it turned out, Megan’s birth father was from Hawaii. He met Megan’s birth mother on Oahu; they moved to California together; and, the rest of the story is history. Or, it was, until Megan began pulling at the strings of her birth father’s family.
Megan had done some sleuthing about her background. Thanks to a DNA test from Ancestry.com, her birth father providing his mother’s maiden name, some connections on Facebook, and a Google search that brought up a March 2000 obituary from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, we found where her birth grandmother was buried.
We reached the cemetery in Naalehu, a place which calls itself the southernmost town in the United States, after having been on the road for about four hours. And as often happens with kids, just 20 minutes into the drive they were already complaining about being hungry.
Luckily the southernmost town in the U.S. is home to the Punaluu Bake Shop, which bills itself as the southernmost bakery in the U.S. So, we stopped for the southernmost lunch in the U.S. Our pit stop also provided us with directions to to the cemetery, less than a mile away.
A right and a left turn later, and we were ready to begin our headstone search. We knew what to look for because Megan had located a photo online of her grandmother’s headstone. We wandered around a while, tried our best to not step on anyone’s graves, and eventually found the headstone with the name we were looking for:
Sarah Sam Oi Tamondong. June 2, 1920-March 8, 2000.
This was the string tying Sarah, dead nearly 20 years, to Megan, myself and our daughters. Here was Megan’s grandmother, a woman who never knew of her granddaughter’s existence. Yet, without her, Megan wouldn’t be here today and we wouldn’t have been in this place, the southernmost cemetery in the U.S., tying generations of a family together.
Our day of family reunions wasn’t done.
Before we left for Hawaii, a cousin told us that Sarah had a daughter named Winifred Yokoyama, who was the keeper of Megan’s family’s history, and who lived in the nearby town of Pahala. Speaking with her could help answer a lot of the questions we had. But, there were two spanners in the works with this plan.
First, we didn’t know where exactly Winifred lived in Pahala. Second, because Winifred’s phone number was unlisted, we hadn’t been able to reach her before we began our Big Island adventure. As such, she had no idea we might be showing up at her door, if we could even find it.
Pahala is a town of about 1,200 people. And in my experience, everyone knows everyone in towns of that size. We stopped at the small-town grocery store, and within minutes, one of the clerks was sharing with four out-of-town strangers the street and house where Winifred lived and the fact that her husband, Melvin, came into the grocery store every morning around 6 to get a cup of coffee.
A couple of left and right turns later and we were at the home of Winifred and Melvin Yokoyama. Megan knocked on the door. Melvin answered, and within seconds, Winifred was there facing Megan.
Megan did the only thing she could in that situation: “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Megan Crum. I think we are related.”
Megan explained who her grandmother was, and Winifred’s face turned from one of “Who is this stranger?” to “I see it now!” She invited us inside.
For more than an hour, we sat and talked about family connections. Megan and Winnie, as Winifred told us to call her, began sharing tales and pieces of information about the family.
It was a day of revelations on both sides. Sarah had been married three times and had 15 children, but Winnie and her siblings knew little about their mother’s previous marriages. In fact, Winnie hadn’t learned about Megan’s birth father, Curtis, or her other four half-siblings until another half-brother introduced himself at Sarah’s funeral in 2000. It suddenly made sense how Winnie could so easily accept an unknown niece showing up unannounced with her husband and kids on her front step on a random Friday night.
We took pictures. Megan and Winnie shared notes and contact information. And Winnie gave Megan a photo of Sarah; it was the first time Megan had ever seen her grandmother.
We made plans to see Winnie and Melvin, again next year, when Winnie’s brother gets married on the Big Island. The evening grew dark, and we still had a long drive back to Waikoloa. We needed to get back on the road; yet, it was tough to pull away.
But after a day of familial discovery, we now have some Big Island ties that will bring us back.