A centennial is a fiction. There is no reason to think that 99 years is any less significant than 100; or that the passage of 101 years is any more meaningful than the century mark. And yet we all do the same things: We assign meaning, depth and significance to what is an arbitrary amount of time.

Maybe we do so because the storyteller in us prefers an arc to things — the rise and the fall, from rags to riches, from humility to hubris, from farmers and soldiers to beauty queens, governors and bank presidents. Those results might be true for an exceptional few; but has that been the case for the majority of the Filipino community over the 20th century?

We know better about how history works — about how the passage of time rarely affords us clear resolutions to defeats and frustrations, and that we don't live inside the tidy categories of social scientists and analysts. After a year of conferences, dinners and exhibits, the Filipino Centennial leaves us with more questions than answers: How do we measure the progress of a community? How do our individual life stories connect with or depart from a larger collective memory?

The past 10 years actually have turned out to be a decade of centennial celebrations for the Filipino diaspora, marking, among other events, the revolution against Spain, the Philippine-American war, the declaration of the first republic in Asia, the U.S. colonization of its only formal colony, the display of Filipinos at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and the first significant migration to and settlement of Filipinos in Hawai'i. Chaotic events, to be sure. So, why "celebrate"?

The logic behind commemorating centennials is about embracing a myth of progress. It's supported by a belief that histories move in straight lines rather than in cycles. While the hardships of past generations are accounted for, documented or even lamented, hundreds of events marking "100 years" posit better days ahead through the pluck and determination of immigrants-turned-citizens.

The centennial has allowed me to think about my own family history, and about how much I need to question the documents I've recovered or the conversations I've had. In re-tracing my family's journeys, I'm reminded that we won't always be able to find comfort or guarantees in the passage of time, that the present is constantly dogged by the past, and that generations often inherit partial memories or missed opportunities from their elders.

I'm reminded of Mother's Day in Sampaloc, Manila, when my brother found a copy of our parents' marriage license listing their birthplaces, the names of witnesses, and their addresses at the time of the ceremony. At the time, I was living in the Philippines. I discovered what I thought was the place where my parents started their lives in 1967, only to find out later that they never stayed there at all.

The location listed on the license was actually the site of my auntie's furniture business back in the 1960s and 1970s. Because my father was a U.S. soldier, he no longer had a permanent address in the Philippines. I later found out that the birthplaces listed on the license were incorrect as well, and that the two witnesses listed on the form were not family relations or close friends, but rather office workers pulled in by the magistrate for the civil wedding.

My journey became no less intriguing on Labor Day in La'ie when I received a call from an archivist who works on O'ahu's Windward side. The archivist's staff has been digitizing records that prove to be of great value to students of Filipino histories in Hawai'i.

A large cabinet holds boxes of deteriorating notebooks and folders of information that date to 1906. I opened a leather binder titled: "Volume 3: Filipinos to be Returned to the Philippines." Each person's date of entry is listed, along with their number, name, ailment or reason for return, and the date of their return.

I searched for family names, tracking signs that members of our clans might have arrived before my father's assignment to Schofield Barracks in the 1950s.

The recorded ailments read startlingly at first, then after hundreds of pages turned, rather numbingly: "beri-beri" (thiamine deficiency), "chronic gastritis," "dementia," "eye trouble," "heart trouble," "intestinal adhesions," "myocarditis," "old age," "pulmonary problems" and "tuberculosis." Two other conditions also repeatedly surfaced in the records: "insane" and "undesirable."

I ran across more than two dozen with the last name of Francisco, my mother's family: Cecilio (a 1924 striker at the Pacific Sugar Mill), Cerapio, Cosme (1924 striker at the Kaiwiki Sugar Co.), Domingo, Enrique, Ernesto.

Listed there as well were my grandfather's name: Paulino Francisco. He arrived on the steamer President Coolidge, two days before Christmas in 1931. He was 23 years old. His destination was the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Co., in Pu'unene, Maui. He worked three days that December, followed by 268 days in 1932, 200 days in 1933 and 167 days in 1934. The record lists no information after that.

Part of my job as a teacher and researcher is to translate, recover and try to make sense of obscure papers and items that can help me tell a more complete story about times, places, events and persons I've never experienced firsthand. Supposedly, all of these shards might add up to the "truth." But it can be difficult tracking down even basic facts.

The centennial may serve as a milestone in our history, placing 100 years of events into a neat category. But to truly gain a deeper appreciation of what that history is and what it means, you have to search beyond the centennial celebrations. As my journey has shown, the past is not always what it appears to be. But I carry with me documents about my family, and relish those errors, inventions, myths and gaps in the record because they lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings.

Theodore S. Gonzalves is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.