The recent passing of several longtime family friends, coupled with the approach of my mother’s 98th birthday, has spurred a sense of urgency in my desire to learn more about our family history.

Virtually all of the information I have is anecdotal, gathered from my parents and their siblings at family get-togethers. As a child, I never tired of hearing their stories of growing up in Makawao, Pauwela and Haiku. By the time I reached my teens, I’d heard their recollections so many times, I could picture their childhood escapades as vividly as my own. Even now, when I visit Makawao town, I see my mother as a 7-year-old sneaking into the movie theater or scraping soft tar off the road on a hot day for makeshift chewing gum.

Mom was the youngest of seven children born to Mitsujiro and Tomeno Shibasaki. She never met her oldest brother and sister; they were 7 and 4 years old when they drowned in an Upcountry punawai, a decade before my mother was born.

Defying their parents’ rules, a group of neighborhood kids snuck out to play in forbidden territory, near a large reservoir. The little girl slipped and fell into the water and her brother, despite not knowing how to swim, jumped in to save her. Terrified, the other children ran away and didn’t tell anyone, for fear of being punished.

My cousins and I heard the cautionary tale often enough to make a lasting impression. All of the other family stories passed down to us had happy endings, even the scandalous ones.

Mitsujiro was born in 1876, in Hiroshima. As a young man in his 20s, he joined a group of Japanese laborers recruited to work in Brazil, presumably on some sort of plantation. When the vessel docked off Kauai to restock provisions, my grandfather seized the opportunity to jump ship. He worked briefly at one of Kauai’s sugar plantations, but ran away again, to escape an abusive luna (boss). He stowed away on an interisland boat and eventually made his way to Maui. As my mom says, thank goodness! Here, he married Tomeno, also from Hiroshima. Sadly, because “they never talked about these things,” mom doesn’t know how or when her parents met.

For the same reason, my paternal grandparents’ courtship is also a mystery, although there is a juicy backstory. My father’s mother, Umeto Nakasone, came to Maui as a young woman, possibly still in her teens, for a marriage arranged by her family in Okinawa. When she arrived, like many so-called picture brides, she was dismayed to learn that her husband was not as young or well-off as he had purported. But she determined to make the best of it, and in a few years, the couple had a son and a daughter. When the boy was a toddler and the baby girl was old enough to travel by ship, their father told Umeto that he wanted to take them to meet their grandparents. He never returned; instead, he kept the children and raised them with a new wife in Okinawa. I don’t know how long it was before Umeto realized she had been abandoned, but she held a grudge against her first husband for the rest of her 104 years of life.

Still, as I stated above, all my family stories (except for the drownings) ended happily. Matsuzo Yogi, a kind and gentle man, became Umeto’s second husband. Together they had five children, my father being the second born.

I didn’t learn about my grandmother’s first marriage until I was in high school, when my grandmother’s first daughter came to Maui to meet her half-siblings and reunite with her mother. Auntie Yoshie visited us a few more times over the years, and her daughter lived with us while attending one semester at Maui Community College. My parents thought it would be nice for me to have an older sister for a few months, and they hoped that Junko and I could help each other through the language barrier. Unfortunately, her English was even worse than my Japanese. Mostly we communicated through hand gestures and giggles.

We’re celebrating mom’s birthday with a family reunion soon. Though she’s the last of her generation in her family, my father’s siblings will all be in attendance. I plan to ask a lot of questions and revel in many more stories. I’ll likely share some of them in future columns. If they aren’t too scandalous.

* Kathy Collins is a radio personality (The Buzz 107.5 FM and KEWE 97.9 FM/1240 AM), storyteller, actress, emcee and freelance writer whose “Sharing Mana’o” column appears every other Wednesday. Her email address is kcmaui913@gmail.com.