On Thursday, I posted a snapshot of my mother and her older sister when they were kids. I also included links to two oral history interviews with my mother when she was 87. I had just found the links, and hadn’t yet had a chance to read through the interviews.

When I did, it cleared up at least one family mystery. My sister, Bonnie, and I had long wondered about the couple of years when my mother and her father moved temporarily to Haleiwa, leaving my grandmother and the two other children at their home in Waipahu. Neither of us could recall my mother ever talking about that period, other than a few recollections of people she met during the time they were there. Bonnie considered it suspicious, and wondered if perhaps our grandparents were having marital difficulties, causing a separation.

Of course, neither of us had questioned my mother about it when she was alive, and when she was gone it was too late for answers.

But then, in the middle of one of those interviews, our question was answered. And it involved some basic facts of family history (and Hawaii history) that I was previously unaware of.

In my mother’s late-in-life account, her parents were able to qualify to buy land in Waipahu that was part of the Kalakaua Homesteads, created in the 1880s, more than 30 years before the creation of the Hawaiian Homes Commission and the set-aside of homestead land to be administered by that agency. My grandparents qualified because my grandmother was half Hawaiian. And, unlike their neighbors, they bought the land in fee rather than lease it. As I recall, their house was on a large parcel of land mauka of old Farrington Highway near the bridge over Waikele Stream.

It then took my grandfather two years or so to build their new house. I don’t know whether he had lost his job at the train depot, or left it in order to work on the house. But when the house was done, he then got a job as a collector for Hawaiian Telephone, which back at that time was known as Mutual Telephone. That job opening was in Haleiwa, but the terms of the homestead agreement required that they live in the Waipahu house.

So he moved to Haleiwa with my mother until he was able get transferred back to Waipahu, which accounted for the 2-year sojourn across the island. No mystery. Just realities of their economic life at the time.

Had we just asked my mother, she would probably have told us this same story. But we never did. Somehow the occasion where it would have been comfortable to pry into her history with direct questions never came up, and so we were left with just our questions.

In 1994, my mother typed up notes on what she had been able to piece together about our extended Hawaiian family. A lot of details were unclear, in part because when she was young, she wasn’t interested in family stuff. And in the 1950s, when she had become interested in genealogy and interviewed elderly Hawaiians about our family, she didn’t question or try to clarify what she was being told because, she explained many years later, “it seemed impolite.”

Perhaps if I had known that she was well aware of what what her hesitance to appear impolite had cost her in terms of her genealogical research, it might have been easier for me to ask my own questions of her, again at the risk of appearing impolite.

It may be we just assume there will always be time to ask those follow-up questions, until there isn’t. One of those lessons that’s usually not learned until it’s too late.