And a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all my Hawaiian-Irish cousins in the Cathcart Ohana!
You see, our mutual great-grandfather, Robert William Cathcart, was an Irish immigrant to Hawaii. He hailed from Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland.
He had children by several Hawaiian women, including my great-grandmother, Kina Kahooilimoku.
The closest I can come to a list of cousins is from the rolls of the George Galbraith Trust. Galbraith was a friend of Cathcart, and several of Cathcart’s children were named as beneficiaries in Galbraith’s 1904 will.
Here’s what that tiny print says:
To the five children of Robert William Cathcart, of Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, the sum of five hundred dollars ($500) each, said children are named as follows–Helualani, Helen Mary, William Andrew Poaha, Edwin, and Arthur, and I desire that the aforesaid Robert William Cathcard act as trust for his aforesaid five children.
The five named children have multiplied.
Their heirs were listed not long ago in the Galbraith Trust’s List of Known Current Beneficiaries. They appear in Annuity 13 (A through E). In addition, a 1990 court document from the trust files traces the Cathcart beneficiaries.
![[text]](http://ilind.net/images_2012/st_pats.jpg)
In any case, I bought a bottle of Irish whiskey, not my usual fare, in honor of the occasion.
I’ll drink a toast to all those Irish cousins, known and unknown, sometime later today.
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A toast for when you toast your cousins: May misfortune follow you the rest of your life, and never catch up.
As you slide down the banister of life may all the splinters face in the down direction.
Bushmills is the good stuff. You can taste the peat.
I am trying to substitute what I consume with local products. So I want to start to drink more local wines and rum. Many people don’t realize that we do have wineries in Hawaii.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_wine
Then again, it might be better to not drink alcohol at all.
Along those lines, I have tried to sharply reduce my consumption of resources.
I no longer eat red meat. That means a lot to me in the face of the Hawaii State government seeking to take over a failing local slaughterhouse that processes a mere 900 pigs a day. The progressive rhetoric of “food security” has almost instantaneously been co-opted by the local status quo. My response is to ban pork and beef from my table. My protein comes from chicken, fish, cheese and eggs (preferably local).
Similarly, I haven’t bought clothes in years and years, and have been simply going through my closet slowly wearing out what I have. I will wear the same seven shirts repeatedly each week, and I try to preserve my other (better) shirts. Of course, the way I dress is lame, but since I have been using my worst clothing all these years, I look forward to the day when I can start to wear my better clothes that are waiting for me in the closet. It sucks, but that is discipline. On the other hand, I have saved a small fortune on clothes.
Also, I have recently been experimenting with giving myself sponge baths every other day rather than showering. That dramatically reduces water consumption, especially energy consumption used to warm the water. I likewise no longer use warm or hot water to wash my laundry, I use cold water with specially formulated cold-water detergent, since 80% of energy used in doing the laundry is used to heat water.
So, these are several issues of interest to me that you might want to blog about on a slow day:
1) The way progressive rhetoric is very quickly appropriated by conservative forces in Hawaii;
2) How we as individuals and families can find creative ways to substitute local produce and products for imports;
3) How to lower our consumption while enhancing the quality of our lives (especially our health and education).
I’m a Cathcart who calls Hawaii home, though I lived there only from 1958 to 1965, leaving after high school. I return as often as I can and my sister lives in Kailua. She has traced the genealogy, though I don’t know where Robert William fits in. She knew some local Cathcarts at UH. Aloha all!