“There are so many restrictions now and I think that’s why the area has been able to be preserved,” Debbie Collard, a Kalaupapa nurse, recently told Hawaii News Now. “I would hate to see what we have here—the ability for people to come here and reflect and be able to have the memorial of their families here—for that to be taken away. I have such mixed feelings about all of it.”

Lindamae Maldonado, whose birth mother was a Kalaupapa patient, said the park service’s plan is “appalling” and would detract from efforts to gather and honor biographical information about the colony. The 66-year-old Maldonado, whose mother lived in Kalaupapa until she died a few years ago, only discovered her roots a decade ago. She stumbled upon the family’s story by chance, and grew up assuming she had a much simpler past based on what her adoptive parents told her. I met Maldonado a few years ago when reporting on family estrangement caused by the quarantine.

Maldonado’s discovery was both uplifting and heartbreaking, and she’s been trying to make sense of the confusion—and fill in the blanks on her new family tree—ever since the revelation. Though she was able to meet her biological mother a few years before she died and visited Kalaupapa regularly over the few years until then, their relationship, Maldonado says, was distant and bittersweet. They’d spend their time together watching Korean soap operas or women’s volleyball with other patients in the common room; they rarely conversed. Maldonado says she was taken into custody by health officials the instant her mother delivered her. She was then adopted by a Catholic couple who kept her Kalaupapa origins secret and whose names even appear on her birth certificate. It was when Maldonado was well into her fifties that she was told by an adoptive cousin about her birth mother. The cousin’s good friend turned out to be Maldonado’s biological aunt.

It’s the what-ifs that cause Maldonado the most pain. Thousands of children were probably born to patients in Kalaupapa, children who would grow up without a clue about their past because of custody laws and stigmatization. A state health official once told me that almost every woman quarantined in Kalaupapa gave birth there at some point.

And not only were children estranged from their parents—entire bloodlines were potentially erased. Maldonado, who is divorced and has three children, met her 76-year-old half brother from her father’s side just a few years ago. She and the brother, Melvin Carillo, are now best friends, and Carillo even moved back to Hawaii in part to be closer to her. When I caught up with them a little over a year ago in Maldonado’s small Oahu townhouse, she and Carillo held hands and completed each other’s sentences, speaking of their upcoming plans to introduce their children. “My other sisters and I would play together. I never had that with her [Lindamae],” Carillo had said then. “That’s my baby sister. We never had nothing together. I lost that, all that—the playing, the caring, the sharing. There was none of that for me and my youngest sister.”