Much of my research in the past few years has focussed on one set of grandparents: George Ikujiro Takagi (1890-1983) and Hisae Yamasaki (1897-1997), or as we call them, Ojiisan (Grandfather) and Obaasan (Grandmother). Ojiisan came to the US in 1907 at the age of 16. He arrived in Seattle by ferry from Victoria, British Columbia on September 23 (about a month shy of his 17th birthday). I don't know much about his first few years here or when he adopted the English name "George," which became his legal name. By 1910 he had settled in Hood River, Oregon, where he became a fruit farmer. Around 1917, he decided to get married and wrote to his family in Japan. A marriage was arranged with Hisae Yamasaki. They were married by proxy in Japan, and his father brought her to the U.S. in October 1918. The two photos in the title graphic show them as they looked around the time of their marriage arrangement. They had five children, all born in Hood River: Harry (b.1919), Toshiko (1921-1929), Robert (b.1926), Florence (1929-1997) and Margaret (b. 1933). To protect the privacy of living relatives, I'm trying to avoid including information that reveals too much about current married names, whereabouts, etc. If you are not familiar with the history of the Issei and Nisei or the internment of U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry during World War II, you'll find some on-line resources here. In February 1942, the Takagi family was sent to Pinedale Assembly Center outside Fresno, California and then in September to the Tule Lake Relocation Camp. In the fall of 1943, they were moved again to Minidoka Relocation Camp in Hunt, Idaho, where they stayed until the summer of 1945 when they moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. |
Click on an
image to find out more
now on-line: Oak
Grove School photos |
About the PhotosIn August 2000 we attended a Japanese-American reunion in Portland, Oregon. In preparation for that I began organizing my grandparent's collection of over 300 photos, hoping to get help identifying them at the reunion. I have assigned catalog numbers (A19_1 or L7_1, etc.) to these photos and am developing a database to organize the information that we have on each image. If you have information or a question about a particular photo, referring to this catalog number will REALLY help me! I hope to add more photos to these pages in future. I also plan to transfer the photographs into archival quality albums and start entering family history notes into a genealogical program. (But sometimes the need to earn a living takes up my time.) The dates are taken from the photo captions that my grandparents and other relatives wrote in later years, so I'm not sure how accurate they are, since I've come across a few photos taken at the same time with different dates. I'm also still in need of complete translations for the Japanese text. (I can only read katakana and hiragana with a dictionary.) I can do free look-ups in the 1928
Census of Japanese in Oregon! Work in progress - Japanese-American Genealogy resources
|
|
Home | What Do I Do? | Recent and
Ongoing Projects
Takagi & Yamasaki Family Milwaukee
Police 3rd District |
1920s
Tavern in Cudahy |
Popple
and Peterman Genealogy This page updated 7 July 2002 Copyright 2001-2002 C. M. Brady |
|
After spending my
time researching, recording and preserving other people's
family histories and artifacts, I am finally trying to do
the same with my own. I switched to doing freelance work
so that I could schedule in time to do my own research as
well. However, I only get to do this as time permits so
please don't get impatient if I haven't updated these
pages in awhile!
