Family ties

A woman and her family travel to Hawaii looking to unite with relatives she never knew

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.

COURTESY OF REX CRUM The author’s daughter, Madeline Crum, left, wife Megan Crum and daughter Lily Crum at the grave of Megan’s paternal grandmother in Naalehu, Hawaii.