AIA - Samurai Secrets

Told in the straightforward manner that Ancestors in the Attic seems to be evolving toward, this simple story was of a woman of Japanese ancestry finding traces of her ancestors, and eventually meeting a relative, in the ancestral country. The search was assisted by having an old passport giving a Japanese address, and by it happening to be a small island. This case especially, with its language barrier and unique form of civil records, demonstrated the benefits of retaining the services of a locally knowledgeable genealogist.

The story was that the person who came to Canada arrived around 1920, with the expectation he would send money home to his widowed mother, but, it was postulated, that was not possible owing to Canada's WW2 internment policy. His failure was given as his reason for shying away from telling his family about his origins. While internment must have been traumatic it leaves open the question of whether he made any remittances in the nearly 20 years between his arrival and the start of WW2.