i am researching and documenting the story of my family.  if you want to share my journey check out www.judianne-islandgirl3.blogspot.com

one person that i would truly like to find is my grandfather.

he was a 'paper son' with 'bought papers' that my grandmother's mother provided for him to make the journey to america and marry her daughter.

because of this, and because rumor has it that he jumped ship when it made port in San Francisco, it is extremely difficult to find any documentation of his existence prior to finding him in the 1938 phone directory for san francisco.

the things i do know about him:
he was kind & caring
he took care of his family, and his extended family of nieces and nephews
he did not speak much english

his REAL name was KU FON
his name in america was PETER FON DONG
he died in 1980

he jumped ship when he arrived in San Francisco
he worked as a long shoreman where he fell off the side of a ship and broke both his feet
he worked as a private chef in several white families homes
he named my father after commander kirby, one of his employers, whom he greatly admired
he had a restaurant on california street and divisadero called kay's fountain.

this last little tidbit has always puzzled me as i did not know 'who' kay was.....but tonight i may have found an important piece of the puzzle.  while flipping through scanned documents related to naturalization on the familysearch.org website, i came across two documents naming the persons as KAY DONG. at first i dimissed this information as i immediately thought it was a female.....but then i remembered the restaurant...and wondered what if?

i flipped over to ancestry.com and found a number of records referring to KAY DONG and lo and behold.....KAY DONG was a male.  i need to do more research as the birthdates and the arrival ports don't seem to match up......but MAYBE just MAYBE i have found an important clue as to what his paper name was.........

....stay tuned as i continue this sleuthing.