Family Ties

     After declaring my thesis my next move was to search out potential leads from my family members. My grandfather had six children and the memories were valuable to me on a personal level of knowing more about my own grandfather. On the academic level the memories my uncles and aunts have serve as an awesome primary source for understanding not only what my grandfather went through but also what it was like for children to live under household of a war survivor. Seeing the value of the individual interview that was so heavily utilized in my Nagamine Project experience I found that I had the confidence to undertake information gathering through talking to my relatives.
 
    With this in mind I first went about to talking to my Uncle Chris who lives in Santa Cruz. Bringing some of the historical pieces my grandfather had saved, we looked through them in an effort to bring to light potential ideas for future research.  Together with my two cousins we looked through the material telling stories and memories as we went along.



The first impression of talking with my uncle reflected the earlier conversations I had with my dad about my grandfather. Both had a reserved since of respect for their father, which would be expected. However given the nature of some of the stories my uncle told me some additional speculation by Uncle Chris and father, as to why my grandfather acted the way he did would be expected. The major summarized point I found from talks with my Uncle Chris was that my Grandfather was very reluctant to talk about his experiences on Wake Island. It seemed that when he did talk about it, the after affects were largely negative.






My uncle described incidents where my grandfather would walk around the house and street late at night "on patrol." My uncle seemed to believe these stories were linked to conversations earlier in the day about his experience as a prisoner. Its my guess that if this happened today, my grandfather would probably be diagnosed has having post traumatic stress disorder as a result of his imprisonment during WWII. Given the state of most returning soldiers after war it would be no surprise that the terrible conditions of Japanese prison camp had a traumatic affect that would haunt him for the rest of his life.






It was great having my uncle and cousins in Santa Cruz to talk with. The interest they showed in our family's history furthered my resolve to continue looking into this story so I could have more to share with them. The bonding we had looking at items from our common history was a great experience and made us a lot closer. With these thoughts in mind, I made a goal to talk with my relatives to share our history and also expand my research network.