In the final chapter of my father’s memoir, Kiwi Spitfire Ace, he wrote about the days after Allied Forces liberated the Marlag und Milag Nord, a German prisoner of war complex nineteen miles northeast of Bremen, in April 1945. My father—or J.D., as he was known to his family nearly all his life—was among the freed prisoners and was transported to Brighton, on England’s southern coast, where all the New Zealand POWs were housed in an old hotel. Intent on making up for his traumatic two years as a POW, he decided to visit a London pub he knew well from before his imprisonment. It did not go as he expected.

“It was filled with strangers,” he wrote. “The world, I discovered, had not stood still while I was away. All my friends from those days were either somewhere in Europe or no longer with us.” When he tried a second favorite old haunt, the result was the same: “Not a familiar face to be seen.” And when he gave up and joined other former POWs at a club filled with soldiers, he was shocked by the absence of joy or frivolity.

“They were having the greatest difficulty in adjusting to being the way they were before they became prisoners,” my father reflected. “The black mood did wear off,” but the normality they all craved, he added, would never return. Instead, he wrote, “we gained enough social camouflage so that we at least talked and behaved like everyone else.”

It was only once my father returned to New Zealand, and to the isolated bach, or beach house, my grandfather built in the beautiful oceanside village of Piha on the coast west of Auckland, that he was finally able to exhale.

“Hardly able to speak with the joy of the moment, I leaned my head against the cool glass and knew with certainty I was home.”

When I read, and reread, those passages, I reflected on what it means to be home.

As an immigrant to the United States who arrived in the country at age twenty, I have always wrestled with a feeling that no matter where I am, be it the United States or New Zealand, I am never truly at home. This feeling is similar to what my father described: the sense that familiar places are no longer familiar or even welcoming. New Zealand is my homeland; it is the place where I grew up. But over the years, when I have returned, I have felt a little like my father walking into that London pub—like I did not quite belong. I have spent most of my life, more than fifty years now, in the United States, and I no longer have a feel for contemporary culture in New Zealand. Sometimes I have thought about moving back, but I do not really think I would fit in there anymore.

There are places I do feel comfortable. I have a real fondness for the state of Texas and its citizens. I lived in Texas for almost ten years, first in Galveston, then in Austin for law school, and finally in Dallas, where I had my first job as an attorney. In all my travels, I have found the people of Texas to be perhaps the warmest people in the country. I remember when I first moved from Buffalo, New York, to Galveston right after splitting from my husband. I had left with virtually nothing to my name: no furniture, no kitchen utensils, no bed. The few items I had gathered would take a couple of weeks to arrive in Texas. Prior to my first day of work at the University of Texas Medical Branch, word somehow had filtered out that I was in a difficult spot.

To my great surprise, on my first day at work, when I opened the door to my new office I was greeted by my new colleagues—people I had never met—who together presented me with a collection of home goods: pots, pans, plates, even an army cot to sleep on. I was in tears.

Truly kind and decent people will always make you feel at home.

As for Northern California, where I have lived for several decades, I still cannot say it feels like home to me. Part of the reason has to do with me being very much an introvert. I have an adventurous spirit, and I might still hop on a plane at the last minute without a lot of planning. But I am not the most social person, and I suppose I have only become less social, especially since I began devoting my days (and nights) to forensic genealogy. So I think that contributes to my feeling of not quite belonging. And then, of course, there is the isolation due to the pandemic.

Yet there are two places where I have experienced an uncanny feeling of being home.

In 2012, I planned a trip to Nova Scotia, one of the beautiful Canadian Maritime Provinces near the coast of Maine. Nova Scotia—Latin for New Scotland—is where, in the early nineteenth century, the Scottish clergyman Norman MacLeod led eight hundred followers out of the Scottish Highlands to a new home in Pictou Harbour, and then to St. Ann’s. My great-great-great-grandparents were among those followers, before boarding one of six ships that eventually took them and their descendants, and the Reverend MacLeod, to New Zealand three decades later.

In Nova Scotia I took a three-week full immersion course in Scottish Gaelic at the Gaelic College in St. Ann’s, where my ancestors had settled. I wanted to know what it would feel like to step on the very land where my ancestors spent decades of their lives. Thanks to a tip from a local bookseller, I connected with a woman called Bonnie McLeod, who had written a book about the original settlers of St. Ann’s and their descendants. I had purchased a copy of her book and studied the map in the front of the book, trying to figure out where my ancestors’ property was located.

Bonnie invited me to dinner at her house, and her husband drove to pick me up. As we pulled into their driveway, I asked if he knew which property my great-great-great-grandparents had built their home on.

“You’re on it,” the husband said.

It turned out that Bonnie’s ancestors had purchased the property from one of my ancestors. She and her brother inherited the property and still owned all two hundred acres that my paternal grandmother’s MacLeod ancestors received in a land grant nearly two centuries earlier. Bonnie and her husband invited me to spend the night at their new home on the property, and as I gazed out a window at the very view my ancestors had gazed at before me, I got goosebumps. I felt something like a physical pull, grounding me to the land.

The other magical place for me is Scotland.

Years ago I visited the lovely and historic small village of Nethy Bridge in the county of Inverness, in the northernmost part of Scotland. The village, most commonly referred to simply as Nethy, is the place my maternal grandfather, William Edward Grant, and generations of Grants before him were born. It is also where the land is soaked with the blood of those who perished in the Battle of Culloden, the final brutal quashing of the Jacobite army in 1745. I have ancestors who fought and died on both sides of the conflict. I visited Drumossie Moor, a windswept, boggy upland stretch just southeast of Inverness (and the actual site of the Battle of Culloden), and I walked around and experienced its sad, desolate nature, and I tried to imagine all the youthful Scotsmen for whom the moor became a dying ground.

I arrived in Nethy Bridge armed with information from a Scottish census record that showed precisely where my grandfather had been born and lived. The records even indicated that the house had three windows. I also carried with me a small, dark, black-and-white photo of the wee stone house that my ancestors had christened Rymore.

My Scottish guide and I found the house at the end of a gently sloped path. An inscribed wooden plank nailed to the mailbox posts announced, Mains of Rymore. We spoke with some neighbors who told us the present owners (not related to my family) were away on vacation, so I was unable to go inside the home. But I did take the liberty of walking around the grounds and marveling at how small the house was, and yet how perfectly warm and suggestive of home.

Once again, I felt a connection to the land beneath my feet, to the grass and trees and ancient stones. It was a good feeling.

The census records also showed my grandfather’s mother had lived in a house named Chapleton just down the road from Rymore in Tulloch. A local farmer pointed us in the right direction and I saw a Chapleton sign affixed to a wooden fence. Behind the fence, yet another wonderfully small but magnificent house, as well as a horseshoe-shaped, red-roofed barn.

The current owners, who were not part of our family, were extremely gracious, and when I explained who I was and why I was there, the wife said, “Oh, there’s something you should see inside.” To my astonishment, inside the main room I saw an imposing stone mantel that had something carved in its face: A.G. 1878.

The initials and date, I presumed, had been carved by my grandfather’s brother, and my great-uncle, Allan Grant—a one-time detective inspector in the London Metropolitan Police, and the forebearer I eventually followed into identifying criminals.

I touched his initials with my fingers, and it felt like touching my history.

“Oh, and there’s something else you need to see,” the wife suddenly said. “The doors.”

She marched us out to the red-roofed barn. It had rained before our visit, apparently heavily, and the ground was quite muddy. I was wearing a pair of slip-on flats, rather than any kind of sturdy boots, and the poor shoes were ruined. But it was worth it. In the barn, we were shown two knotty, wide-planked wooden doors that had once been part of the main house. Both doors were covered with scribblings, made decades before.

I looked closely and saw the scribbled names and dates.

James Cameron, 1941. John Cameron, 1915. Mary Cameron, 1915. And dozens more.

I knew that my grandfather’s sister, Jane Edward Grant, had lived at Chapleton before her marriage to Charles Cameron. She died of the flu in 1906. After that, it appeared from the names on the doors, the Cameron family had, at some point, moved into the home.

What an astonishing discovery. It was as if the two old wooden doors were actual records of my family history, as real as a census record but far more evocative. Those two doors were treasures—proof that my ancestors had trod this ground and lived within these walls and dined and danced and struggled in this wonderful place tucked away in the Scottish Highlands.

A place that was my home.

Perhaps we are only ever truly home when we stand on the land on which our ancestors roamed. As a genealogist, I had spent hours tracing my family roots all the way back to these ancestral lands, to the ancient hills and mountains and moors and deserts from which we all have sprung. Why is it that so many of us are drawn to these places, even if, for most of our lives, we were not even aware of our connection to them? What binds us to these lands after centuries of our families being someplace else?

I do not have the answers. Throughout history, men and women have written epic poems and stories and songs about what it means to be home, and about the pull of our homelands. I have written no such poems or songs. But I do feel the pull. In the end, perhaps that is all genetic genealogy is—a tool that helps us achieve what we desire, what we yearn for, at the most primal level:

To belong.