Mini-Bio

I'm Kyong-Mi Dillard (nee Arcala). I was born and raised in Southern California, have lived in Hawaii and in Oregon.

My mother is immediately Korean on both sides, born Pusan, South Korea. My father was immediately a blend of French-Canadian (from his mother) and Ilocano (from his father). He was born and raised in south west Detroit, Michigan. Anyway, genealogy was always an important project in my family (you can find quite a few family trees created by relatives on varying ancestry sites). My paternal grandmother, Lenore Evelyn Barron, began her research sometime in the 1960s. Unfortunately, that tree was erroneously done in English. French names like Pierre were documented as Peter, Marie was Mary, Étienne was Stephen, and so forth. Some time ago, one of my paternal aunts uploaded a Gedcom online of our ancestors, with the names erroneously written and I decided to translate, one by one, each name to their French spelling. Lo and behold, I found matches all over the internet, and my avid research began.

My maternal grandfather was somewhat notable. His name was Cha Seung Yul (성길 차), and he was a Democrat and a Journalist in South Korea. My grandmother, Kim Boon Sun, was a mistress to him, as he was already married with children. He had 5 daughters and a son with my grandmother. My uncle was born after my grandfather's death. He died from complications from electricity torture, because he was thought to have been a spy or "know information."

Not much is known about my maternal grandmother, Kim Boon Sun. She went blind in her 50s from either cataracts or glaucoma, and died at age 75. She birthed all her children by herself in her home, and from what my mother tells me, she did a remarkable job at bouncing back to tend to her children after each child was born. She was a conservative woman and a "country girl." At some point, she ran a motel where American soldiers would come to stay or eat lunch. My mother was raised near an American base and is a literal survivor of the Korean War, as having been injured during the war.

That is as much as I know from my maternal side of the family. The rest of my genealogical research is my paternal side. It's such an amazing side that I feel like I'm lacking something in not knowing my maternal family.

I have 2 amazing sons and a daughter and was with their father for 21 years, from 1995 to 2016. Hobbies outside of Genealogy include scrapbooking, history, reading fiction novels, writing poetry, exercising (hiking and jogging) and crossword puzzles.

My husband Trevor and I were married in Oregon.  He has 2 biological daughters and 2 biological sons, and one hanai daughter. They were all born in Hawaii.  Combined, I have gained five children in addition to my three.  My step-kids call me Auntie, which is a sign of respect as Ma'am or Miss in most of the islands.

Just a nifty family tree I whipped up on paper.

If you would like more information about me, please refer to this link.