have the information. He never talked about the camps," she says.

"That's one of my favourite things about working here. How many national parks do you get to come to and learn your personal family history?" Masters responds.

Nakamaru also finds camp newspaper clippings describing her great-grandfather's death, but omitting the story that the family told: that it had been a suicide. That great-grandfather, her grandmother's father, was interned at Poston. He had asthma, and as the story is told, could not breathe in the harsh southwestern US climates. And so, it is said, he took his own life.

Nakamaru also learns of a relative she did not know existed - a great uncle, Tamotsu "Tom" Mikasa, whose relation to her family she has since verified with older relatives.

Masters escorts Nakamaruwas quite the hustler?" Nakamaru asks. Masters says she has not, yet.

"The thing we found more than anything else was marbles - everywhere," she says. This was how the children escaped the realities of incarceration. Masters suggests that Nakamaru contact Manzanar archaeologist Jeff Burton, who is currently working on multiple requests to dig for souvenirs of internment, tucked into the earth. They have found things like marbles and more recently, bottles of sake, a type of Japanese liquor that had been contraband at the camp.

Masters escorts Nakamaru to the site of Matsuoka's barrack, a five-minute walk from the reconstructed barracks. Calculating by feet and using remnants of piping and foundation left there, Masters estimates where Matsuoka's cot would have been.

And there, a tree with soft, bright bark, tenacious