Her father Bakhshish Singh Dhillon and her mother Rattan Kaur lived in Oregon and California. Her father wasone of the first Punjabi pioneers to arrive in the United States in 1897. Kartar Dhillon was the fourth child in the family. At the time she was born, their family was the only Indian family in Simi Valley. From 1916 to 1922, she and her family lived in Astoria, Oregon, where she and her siblings attended school and her father worked at a lumber mill. Her family
