Family Photos

Topaz Japanese Internment Camp, Utah

I have been so tired and busy lately that I haven't had time to post much of anything. Between school and work, any "free" time I have is spent stressing or trying to rest.

The other night I was checking my emails and saw I had something from ancestry.com. I logged in and saw that I had quite a few notifications spanning back to near the beginning of the year, all with connection hints for my family tree (I did a DNA test back around January). I didn't have time to really dig into it, but it did remind me that I had received some photos over the summer that my great-uncle on my mom's side had scanned and sent to one of my sisters. I have been wanting to share them somewhere, and I feel like steemit is a good place.

The first photo (above) is of the internment camp that my maternal grandmother's family lived at during WWII after the forced evacuation and internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. I don't know whether my family took that photo or if it was taken by a friend.

My great-uncle Tommy was only around 7 when he was interned with my great-uncle Hank, my grandmother, their other siblings, and my great-grandparents

I remember Uncle Tommy telling us how he and the other kids would do things like race scorpions for fun in the camps


I think this is a photo of my great-uncles Hank, Tommy, and Grandma Emiko in the camps


My grandmother, Emiko, and I believe my Auntie Kaz, after the war probably

I believe this is an older photo before the war, with my great-uncle Eddie and maybe Uncle Hank, on the farm my great-grandpa grew strawberries on as a share-cropper (my best guess)

The next two photos could be younger photos of my great-grandparents in Japan, but I am not 100% sure. I believe the man is my great-grandpa Kiyoto, so I assume the woman is great-grandma Mutsuko, but I need to talk to Uncle Tommy to find out for sure.

My great-uncle Harry on my maternal grandfather's side passed away earlier this year, and my mom came into possession of a huge number of albums that we haven't gone through yet. I hope to have time to go through them in the near future and do some more posts with a little history from that side.