General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I would really like to let PEOPLE know... [View all]Hekate
(100,133 posts)... but since I landed in Santa Barbara I can't complain. My roots are deep here now.
Anyway, it wouldn't take too much research to find your ancestors over only a century or so, since record-keeping was/is pretty good. Start with the oldest members of the family who are still alive and write to them about their own memories. I did that when I was only 14, after coming across a copy of family begats at my grandma's, copied from someone's Bible. That went back to the 1600s. I started writing to my great-aunts and great-uncles to see what else I could find out. (Years after that my mom went into genealogy in a big way and wrote 4 books, but that wasn't me.) All you want is the time from when your family's first Issei arrived in Hawai'i, and you are probably Yonsei, only 4th generation, or maybe Gosei. Very likely your oldest relatives remember obaasan and ojiisan and where they came from in Japan, as well as their names. (See, all the Japanese I do know is related to having lived in Hawai'i; not grammatical, but words in common usage there.)
However, since what you are interested in is out-marriage, cancel that whole paragraph above. Just start with your parents' cousins and see who is related to whom and work back from there. Hawai'i is justifiably famous for its rate of intermarriage -- chances of remaining all of one ethnicity after a century or more is not unheard-of, but still...
You might be one little part-Hawai'ian flower after all.
Or part-Danish, like my former neighbors (they were Japanese-Hawai'ian-Danish and used the Danish last name. When some long-lost 3rd cousins from Denmark looked them up because they were going to visit Hawai'i, weren't they surprised!)