Lost and Found: A Visual Journal

Like many Americans, I can trace my ancestry back several generations to someone making the move to the United States. As a middle school student in Pennsylvania, after moving to the continental US from Hawai’i, I remember raising my hand during the immigration unit in social studies class and saying, “my family didn’t come through Ellis Island – they came from the other side.”

At 19 years old, Pablo Dumaluan left the Philippines and started a life in Na’alehu, on the island of Moku o Keawe, Hawai’i. He was the only one of his nine siblings to leave the Philippines and not return. A misspelling at the sugar cane plantation where he found work and community with men from his home country led to the spelling of his family name as Domaloan. 102 years later, his children Paul (my grandfather, d. 1995), Gordon, Patrick, Melvin (d. 2022), and Annette have grown his family tree and spread across Hawai’i and the mainland United States.

Annette has spent the past several years poring into her family ancestry, attempting to reconnect with as much family in the Philippines as she can. “I want my grandchildren to love my dad (Pablo) the way I loved him. I want the younger generation to know their family, and know who they are,” she says.

And so she reaches out to people with the last names of those that are written on the backs of old photographs. Connects on Facebook with people that appear in her ancestry.com database. Eventually she is contacted by a woman in Mindanao who proves her relation to us by showing a photo of my grandfather on her wall. We had no idea who she was – but they remembered my grandfather maintaining contact with the Filipino family while he was in the Navy. “The Commander”, they all call him. 

In April 2024, my mother called me and asked if I wanted to go to the Philippines with my Lolos and Lolas... in two weeks. The chance to document the journey was one I could not turn down.