The Last Family Portrait ...

 

My Dad's personal story may be totally unique and foreign to those folks that live here in the USA today ... but to my family and the servicemen that lived through it on Guam, then, during WWII, it was all too real. As we approach July 21, Guam's Liberation Day holiday, the stories my father told me of that time are front and center in my mind.

• Stories of Papan Batchit, his blind grandfather, and Mama Ling, his grandmother, on their ranch before WWII and during the Japanese Occupation
• Stories of their march to Manengon, the Concentration camp during WWII
• Stories of his father always escaping the camp by swimming down the river, returning with food
• Stories of Japanese brutality in the camp
• The story of losing his mother and his newborn baby brother, and burying them in unmarked graves --- their brother during the march, and their mother during a bombing raid
• Stories of my dad singing and dancing for the soldiers

After the war, my father and his siblings, now without their mother, were divided up within the large family to be taken care of. His father remarried and started another family. He, then, died several years later, at a relatively young age, so, my father and his siblings were left without both parents. Dad was about 4 when his Mom died and was about 14 when his Dad passed away. My father and one of his sisters, had been taken in by his mother's older sister and her husband, for several years. They were a Navy family with 2 young daughters of their own, and in order to be able to continue to stay with them, now they were orphaned, travel and move around with them, they needed to be legally adopted. They got the elders in the family's permission, and changed their last names, and began a new and different chapter in their lives, with their adopted parents and siblings -- although, they always remained very close to their biological siblings.

Looking back to that time, I know we have no pictures or records of my Dad's mom ... his biological Mom ... Joaquina.

I have always been interested in genealogy and the family tree and have spent hours and hours on looking up and researching our family tree on the internet on Ancestry.com, and have incorporated and cross-referenced the records given to me from my husbands side of the family and from my Dad's side of the family in the form of Uncle Richard F. Taitano's Family Records. There is also a huge Chamorro Roots Genealogy Roots Project that is trying to help Guamanians/Chamorros with their family trees.

I had a feeling that I needed to find Joaquina ... that I needed to find her for my Dad. I knew that the 1940 Census' were being released in April ... 72 years after they had been taken, for privacy reasons ... I knew that this was the only way that I might be able to see her ... if she was there ... before the war came to Guam ... with her family surrounding her ... before they were separated and divided ...

My Dad would have been 4 months old in April of 1940. He would have been the youngest, with 4 older than him. His younger sister Connie would not have been born yet ... and the brother he lost in the war, Frankie, would not have been born, either. I asked Dad where they would have been living. He said they would have been living in either Agana or Barrigada, or they would have been down in Janum, their beach property, away from everyone, and away from the count.

I accessed the Guam 1940 census early. It was un-indexed, so I had to go through each page ... for each of the villages -- Agana and Baragada ... looking at each name for a familiar "face" in each name. I searched high and low, to no avail ... and I thought that there was no hope ... I thought that I'd never find them.

A couple of weeks later, I started looking again. I decided that I would download every single town or village in the Guam Census of 1940 and look in EVERY SINGLE page to be sure that perhaps I didn't overlook some family member. I looked in Agana ... I looked in Baragada ... and I wondered why I didn't see any familiar names. I found Grandma Garrido ... I found Grandpa Garrido! I found some of the Taitano family in Agana and Baragada. Where was the rest of my Taitano family? I decided to look in Dededo ...

... AND THERE THEY WERE ...

a whole bunch of them, all on Papan Batchit's ranch ... including:

• My Great-Grand Father - Juan SN Taitano (Papan Batchit) - 54
• My Great-Grand Mother - Rosario F Taitano (Mama Ling) - 50
• My Grand Father - Carlos F Taitano - 29
• My Grand Mother - Joaquina L Taitano - 23
• My Uncle - Carlos L Taitano - 7
• My Uncle - Juan L Taitano - 5
• My Aunt - Rosita L Taitano - 3
• My Aunt - Esther L Taitano - 2
• My Dad - Jose L Taitano - 4 months old

It was around 3:00 AM ... I screamed ... I cried ... I sobbed some more ... I called my Dad on the West Coast ... and I cried again. It was hard to put it into words ...

It was no disrespect, at all to Grandma Garrido, her sister, the only Grandma I've ever known, who raised my Dad ... who raised a lot of the kids during that time ... NO WAY ... NEVER ... in fact, there are not enough words in this world to describe the love and respect and devotion I have for this wonderful woman.

To me, it was my way to remember Joaquina ... remember, there are no pictures, no records left after the war ... no gravesite ... nowhere to leave a flower or memorium ... no place to honor HER and say, "YES, you are the mother of THESE children, the wife of THIS man ... YOU EXISTED ... YOU MATTER ... and you're my Grandma, too, I have not forgotten that fact!" ... this census STILL makes me cry, as I type this ... it's the last piece of paper ... the last record we have of this intact family ... of Joaquina with her family surrounding her ... with all of the kids with their birth names. It's like a family picture ... the last family portrait ever taken of this family when they were all together ...

I talked to my Dad's wife, the next day, after I sent the pages of the Census to them. She said that he didn't sleep at all that night. She said that he stayed up all night looking at them. It makes me wonder what my 72-year-old Dad must have been feeling while he looked at those pages ... at all of those names on those 2 pages ... with his birth name written there for all to see ...

I hope he knows what a labor of love this was for me ... what this continues to be for me ... what researching the family tree, and genealogy in general, continues to be for me ... but I did do this for him ... and for his siblings ... and for the children and grandchildren ... but primarily for my Dad ... and for Grandma Joaquina.

... and I'm still in tears as I go back to re-read and edit this ... :::sigh:::