It's quite serendipitous that I found this site. My father, Mike Bitanga, also hails from Ilocos Norte. It's my understanding that his great grandfather was a European missionary who travelled to the Philippines and married a Filipina. The original last name was Bitenger, or something like that. Anyone else familiar with this story?
I live in Virginia and work in Washington, D.C., but many of my cousins reside in California and Hawaii.