How a book brought long-lost cousins together

SEATTLE — The book that brought a family together was titled, appropriately, “We Are Not Strangers.”

Jan Rogers, a retired marketing and product manager living in Issaquah, Washington, was intrigued when she saw a story in The Seattle Times last October about an upcoming author event.

The book, a graphic novel about a local Sephardic Jewish immigrant who helped safeguard the homes and businesses of Japanese American friends in forced incarceration during World War II, sounded fascinating — but she was most drawn by the author’s name, Josh Tuininga. Jan, whose surname before marriage was also Tuininga, wondered if he might be a relative, perhaps the descendant of some cousins she hadn’t seen in a long time.

Though Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington, was a long drive from home for her, she knew she needed to go and find out.

Around that same time, a little over 30 miles away in Edgewood, Pierce County, Holly Tuininga showed The Times article to her husband, Gary Tuininga. He definitely didn’t know a Josh Tuininga — “I thought, ‘Who the heck is he?’” Gary remembered — but wondered if this might be that branch of the family that he’d always heard about but never met.

“We would call them the Everett Tuiningas,” Gary said. There had been a falling-out in the family, several generations ago, though he didn’t know much about it. But he was intrigued enough that he and Holly ventured up north of Seattle on that October evening, wondering what they might learn.

STRANGERS NOW KIN

Fast forward to June 2024, and a laughing group of cousins are gathered at Jan’s home (“Hi, cuzzes!” says one, upon entering): former strangers now kin, happily interrupting each other in the way that families do.

Jan, remembering that evening at Third Place last fall, said she introduced herself to Josh after the event and quickly learned that his father, Ron Tuininga, was indeed a cousin she hadn’t had a conversation with in 50 years.

“Ron turned around and I recognized him, as this little boy I used to babysit for.” While they were happily reconnecting, Holly approached. “She said, ‘I’m a Tuininga too! You’ve got to meet my husband!’ So she drags me over to meet Gary,” Jan said. “I had never met these people in my life. I didn’t know they existed.”

Jan and Ron are first cousins; they are second cousins to Gary, with whom they share great-grandparents.

There were, indeed, two branches of Tuiningas in the Northwest who, until recently, had no contact with each other, due to a rift in the family more than 100 years ago.

The current generation has been able to piece together the story: Jan, Ron and Gary’s great-grandparents lived in Wisconsin, where they owned a large farm and a timber mill; their family had emigrated from Friesland (a Dutch province) in the 19th century. Two of their sons, Albert and Charles, became engaged to a pair of local twin sisters, Verlie and Viola Aue, sometime in the early 1900s. And … well, it seems the path of true love did not run smoothly.

“The two girls didn’t like each other — they were constantly bickering and fighting,” said Bob Tuininga, also a first cousin of Jan and Ron, and known as the family historian.

The rumor in the family, passed down over generations, is that there was some canoodling going on before the couples married, and that the Tuininga boys and Aue girls switched partners briefly before getting back together. Verlie became pregnant, and she and Albert were married quickly in a shotgun wedding, sometime around 1905.

Verlie’s father, Bob said, gave them some money and told them to go away for a year, because of the shame attached then to a pregnancy obviously conceived outside of wedlock. They bought tickets to the end of the railroad, Bob said, “and the end of the railroad in those days was Everett, Washington.”

Eventually settling in the Arlington area, Verlie and Albert had 11 children. Bob’s father was their firstborn, Jan’s father was the fourth, and Ron’s was the 10th. Those cousins knew each other growing up — Ron remembers Jan as his “cool” babysitter — but they mostly drifted apart in adulthood, living in separate cities, busy with their lives. And they had no idea of the other branch of the family; Verlie and Viola’s feud ran deep.

Gary knows less about his grandparents’ history, just that Viola and Charles married and made their way to Hope, Idaho, where they had six children and Charles worked in the lumber business. Gary’s father and uncle eventually came to the Seattle area, settling south of the city. They knew about the Everett branch of the Tuiningas, Gary said, but nobody ever made an attempt at reunification, on either side. “You just kind of go along with what your parents are doing.”

FINDING SIMILARITIES

Now, the reunited cousins gather frequently and are finding all kinds of similarities between them.

Jan and Gary, it turns out, were born on the same day, and have shared similar health challenges. Josh and his wife, Lisa, have twin girls — a present-day echo of Verlie and Viola, though presumably much more amicable. And all of them have something in common: “When we make a dinner reservation, we turn into Smiths,” said Gary. (Josh’s family uses “Turner” in situations where it’s not worth instructing someone on how to pronounce and spell “Tuininga”; Bob uses “Dean.”)

Josh spent much of that June gathering quietly smiling — clearly still processing that his book, with its themes of making connections during times of conflict, had such a resonant impact in his own family. His teen daughters have been texting with Gary’s granddaughter — another link between the generations. The ugliness of a long-ago feud has faded away, leaving only laughter and kinship.

Jan’s home, Holly said, has become “the Tuininga clubhouse,” where the family gathers, tells stories, learns more about each other. “It’s just this attraction, like magnets,” said Gary. “From not even recognizing each other or knowing anything, we just came together and fit nicely.”

Jan described the “wonderful, warm, heartfelt kind of feeling” of knowing a new branch of her family, made “doubly wonderful” by the fact that not many of their generation remain: “It touches my heart, big time.”

Around the coffee table, a group of Tuiningas murmured agreement, their voices seeming to blend as one.