Living After the Manner of Happiness

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...

Opera House and Harbour Bridge at sunset Mike and I spent the last few days in Sydney, and I keep thinking about how we got here. As a genealogist and family historian, my goal is never just names and dates. It is discovering the stories that connect families across generations and build relationships. Two years ago, I reached out to a DNA match while trying to solve a mystery: Why did my great-aunt die in a country I could not connect her to? Ancestry confirmed that Mandy and I shared my paternal grandmother’s line. Mandy turned out to be the granddaughter of my great-aunt, and she filled in the missing pieces. Two sisters left England and built lives on opposite sides of the world.  Lisle Sisters (left to right): Jean, Pippen, Mary, Olga, and Betty Mary immigrated to North America and Olga immigrated to Australia My grandmother immigrated to Canada in 1949 and later to the United States. Her sister sailed for Australia in 1961 as one of the Ten Pound Poms, British immigrants who ...

I used to introduce my seminary students to the Old Testament with a scene from the film  Dead Poets Society . Perhaps you remember it. Robin Williams as John Keating leads his students out of the classroom and into the hallway lined with trophy cases and photographs of alumni long gone. He has a student read a few lines of poetry and then invites the class to lean in close to those faded faces staring out from decades past. "Now I would like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. You’ve walked past them many times. I don’t think you’ve really looked at them. "They're not that different from you, are they?" Keating observes. "Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they're destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you." Then comes the hard question: "Did they wait until it was too late t...