Returning Home
I looked out the window of our bedroom early one morning to see the full moon over Veitongo Beach . Mike and I spent the last ten days with my parents, my five siblings and their spouses in the land of my childhood, and I keep thinking about how much this place changed while somehow staying exactly the same. Most of my work as a family historian focuses on tracing names through records that go back generations. This trip flipped that. Instead of searching for the story, I walked back into where it began. Fifty-seven years ago this month, my parents, younger sister, and I left the United States for a small island in the South Pacific. My dad had just finished his bachelor’s degree in English, and his first job was teaching at a private school on the island of Tongatapu, Tonga. My parents packed up our belongings, gathered my younger sister and me, and flew away from family and everything familiar, stopping in Hawaii and Fiji along the way. This is the place where I first learned about G...
