Hawai’i woman finds distant relation to royalty during genealogy search

By Diane Ako

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    HAWAII (KITV) — A local woman recently went digging through her family history, looking to find her long-lost biological father. She found him – and way more than she bargained for in the process; hen you go to open doors, you sometimes never know what you’re going to find.

It all started with one question. “Who was my dad?” wonders Leigh Uemura. “I always wondered who my biological dad was.”

Uemura grew up as an only child, and as an adult, wanted to have a deeper sense of family. So she embarked on a four-year search for her father, Robert Clark. “Having found him, though I’m sad he’s passed, my cousins are able to tell stories about who he was as a person and that makes me feel connected and more complete,” she says.

Uemura met cousins on Maui she didn’t know she had, who were able to share stories. “I wanted to know who he was as a person. His mannerisms, was he witty, was he- what? They were able to fill in those blanks for me,” she says.

They even gave her a gift. Uemura holds up a railroad tie with a toy train glued to the side. “This is a peg from the Union Pacific Railroad that he worked on for 35 years. I cherish it even more because I have nothing of my dad.”

During her search, she also found more relatives she did not expect! “I was totally shocked to learn my ancestry goes back to Diana Spencer!” she shares.

That’s right, Princess Diana of Wales. Uemura continues, “It’s pretty cool being related to royalty.”

It’s very, very distant, but she says it’s there. As Uemura tells it, Princess Diana is “the wife of my great-grandnephew of husband of aunt of sister-in-law of first cousin-once-removed of husband of third-cousin-once-removed of husband of third great-grandmother.” Uemura pauses for a breath then sums, “She’s my tenth cousin.”

HOW did that happen? Uemura has roots in the UK. “Most of my family is from Scotland. My grandfather moved to America, to Idaho. And my mom then moved to Washington, Oregon, then Hawaii,” she details.

Now she’s penning a letter of concolences to Buckingham Palace about the Queen’s death. You know, her relation by marriage. Just goes to show, she says, “We are all connected. And to say, ‘Hey, Cousins, wazzup!’ Ha ha ha.”

Yes, it’s sometimes a very small world. Or as Uemura might say, it’s all relative.

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