Every now and then I go back and do a little more family research, hoping to break early brick walls and looking to break new ground. I got a little over excited a few days ago when one of the leaves (hints) on Ancestry.com led me to other people’s trees, showing that one of my ancestors (a Major Ralph Hart who might have fought in the French and Indian War) was descended from a Eustace Hart and a Mary de Vere. I don’t like depending on other people to do the research for me because I can’t fully trust that they’ve done their research correctly, but I got excited because Eustace Hart was a knight, and Mary de Vere was the daughter of John de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford. I can’t tell you how hugely I swelled with pride at the thought that I might be much more than from a line that my grandmother once heard. To have come from the Earl of Oxford line? And I thought being descended from an American Revolutionary War colonel was something!

But I do my homework, and I care about accuracy. Becoming the family genealogist is akin to appointing yourself a journalist, and you absolutely must verify your reports with at least two proper sources—official historical sources—and not just rely on other people’s trees because other people get things wrong all the time. The republishing of other people’s trees without verifying the sources only perpetuate erroneous information, or so I learned when I complained on the message boards about how difficult it was for me to confirm that Eustace Hart had any kids at all!

The advice I got: disregard other family trees.

I howled in frustration, banged my fists on either side of me cursing everyone who ever simply added other trees to theirs in their drunken quest for more names and generations, and began systematically ignoring all the leaves that only led me to other people’s trees. Then I stopped reaching for greatness and worked close to home, did more research on my great-grandfather, Harry. He’s the one who came to the Philippines from upstate New York, the one through his mother is descended from a Revolutionary War colonel, good ol’ dependable Joseph who had his own pew in church for his family, and I made a startling discovery. Harry was on a list titled: World War II Prisoners of War, 1941-1946.

What?!

Harry would have been in his 60s by then, long retired from fighting the Spanish in the Spanish-American war. Why would he have been a prisoner of war during WWII? He couldn’t have still been in the military, right? Turns out he wasn’t. He was interned by the Japanese as an American civilian in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in the Philippines.

Oh my God, the things I didn’t know.

I had only recently watched the movie Paradise Road on cable when I discovered this, so I was aware of the sort of life a person would live as an internee under the Japanese. It’s not fun, let me tell you. It’s a hard, hard life.

And here I was discovering that my Harry, at 65, was interned by the Japanese, in an old university no less. So, in the interest of finding out more and learning what it must have been like for him, I purchased some DVD footage and some books on the subject from online, and I looked for photos online and for the history of the university.

All this time, I kept wondering about his son, George. Why wasn’t he interned? He would have been in his 40s. Could he have been out fighting the Japanese? I was told he was a cripple—something wrong with his leg. Was it a war injury? My mom said he didn’t like talking about the past, that it made him sad. What happened?

I also discovered that George’s first wife eventually moved to Kern, California, where she died in the early 1990s, but I have never been able to find out much about Harry’s wife. Nothing at all. No birth date, no death date, not even a marriage date. Still so many brick walls.

But what a wealth of new information, that Harry was at Santo Tomas.

It almost made up for losing an ancestor listed on the Domesday Book.

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