MAKAPU'U — Sarah Michel leaned her head on her uncle Alfred's shoulder and instantly broke into tears.

"Just touching him, I feel my dad," Michel, 36, said yesterday as the San Diego woman met her father's side of the family for the first time and completed a journey of self-discovery.

Michel, who was born in Vietnam and raised by adoptive parents in Michigan, is the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and a U.S. serviceman from Hawai'i, the late William Kapena Alameda.

"Most of my life there has been this empty feeling inside me," Michel said at the family gathering at Makapu'u Beach. Now, having met her father's family, she said that void has been filled.

Her mother worked on a U.S. Army base during the Vietnam War, washing soldiers' uniforms. There she met Alameda, a 23-year-old Hawai'i soldier who wooed her with laughter and the 'ukulele.

Just months into their relationship, Michel's mother discovered she was pregnant and told Alameda the news. Before Michel was born, Alameda was killed in action.

Raising a daughter in the war-torn country was too much for her mother to handle, Michel said. She was put up for adoption. A Michigan family adopted her when she was 4 years old. It wouldn't be until she was 16 that she would see her mother again.

Michel was reunited in 1984 with her mother, who was living in Utah with Michel's three half-siblings. "At that time I wasn't really focused on knowing who my father was," she said. "I was just 16 years old."

Michel moved to San Diego and so did her mother. She began to have more questions about her father, but answers were hard to find.

"My mother really didn't want to talk about my father. It was really difficult to get information," Michel said.

But she was able to get some information that would eventually lead her to her family.

"The information I got about my father was that at one time he went to Hawai'i," Michel said. "His name was William or Alan, I heard. It wasn't always clear because of the language barrier (between mother and daughter)."

Michel's search for her father again turned up nothing, and she became discouraged. Her fiance, Johan Oeyen, soon took up the search and was determined to help unite Michel with her father.

He searched military Web sites and databases for any Alan, Allen or William he could find. He found nothing. Then last August, Michel's mother told him he was searching for the wrong name. It wasn't Alan; it was Alam.

"That one letter changed her (Michel's) whole life," said Oeyen.

On a Vietnam veterans Web site, Oeyen did a search for "Alam" and turned up two last names: Alamos and Alameda.

"I said, 'William Alameda, that's my dad,' " Michel said. "I just had a feeling. I knew it instantly."

The man they had found, William Alameda, was listed as a native of Hawai'i, serving in the same province in Vietnam, and same time frame, where Michel was born.

Immediately, Oeyen began calling members of the Alameda family living in Hawai'i. One of the first to receive a phone call was Gordon Alameda, one of William Alameda's brothers.

"I told him, 'There's a lot of Alamedas on this island,' " Gordon Alameda said. "You must have the wrong Alameda." Gordon Alameda, 48, had never heard of his brother having a child or even a girlfriend while in Vietnam.

But a few phone calls later, there could be no mistaking Michel's lineage.

"Every time she called, I'd say, 'Eh, she sounds like Auntie Leo,' " Alameda said. Michel and the Alameda family began swapping pictures and became convinced Michel was a relative.

Michel received the first picture she'd ever seen of her father from an aunt in Hawai'i. "It was very moving for me. I was at work and I cried," Michel said. "I'd never seen anyone that looked like me before."

Michel continued calling family members in Hilo, Hawai'i, and even those on the Mainland. Through phone conversations, Michel began to discover family traits, including her artistic inclinations and her daughter's musical abilities. She even traced her craving for liver back to a dish her father's mother had cooked every week.

In December, Michel received DNA test results that confirmed she is a member of the Alameda family.

This past weekend Michel came to Hawai'i to visit her family. After only two days in Hawai'i, she said it already feels like this is home.

Twenty of her uncles, aunties and cousins met Michel at the airport on Saturday, and yesterday more gathered for a family picnic at Makapu'u.

"I feel complete now," said Michel, surrounded by her new family. "I had this longing for my father, and now I feel complete."

Gordon Alameda told her: "You found your family — you know where you belong."

Alfred Alameda, 53, said he never needed any convincing, DNA test or otherwise, that Michel was indeed his niece. "There wasn't a doubt in my mind," he said.

Never knowing who her father was and barely knowing her mother, Michel grew up thinking she was half Vietnamese, half African-American. Now she knows she's actually Hawaiian and Portuguese.

Yesterday morning Michel visited the grave of her father at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

Gordon Alameda said the whole family has a feeling of completeness as well. "This brings us closer," he said. "With her as a new (addition) to the family, it brings us together."

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.