We discovered more of my mother’s treasures yesterday.

My sister, Bonnie, and I started digging into the piles of miscellaneous stuff that has been sitting for years in a small room off of the garage of my parents old house in Kahala. Everything covered with years of accumulated dirt the trade winds deliver so effectively from the stretch of Kealaolu Avenue running in front of the house. There were a number of plastic bags that were simply disintegrating, crumbling into tiny plastic fragments at the slightest touch. Another cache of previously used gift bags, empty boxes that were sure to come in handy “some day,” including a fine collection of “Harry & David” boxes that seemed to be favored by the roaches (ugh), plus shelves housing an incredible collection of obscure mimeographed genealogy references about families in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas that were part of my mother’s long adventure tracking her father’s roots. It was all dirty, aged, and should probably just all be dumped into the trash, but Bonnie and I are both loath to destroy historical references without being assured that better copies exist and are accessible somewhere. There’s a copy of the first Kapalapala, the University of Hawaii annual, typed genealogical notes on a variety of families, what seemed like dozens of small wood picture frames that she apparently expected to use “someday.”

And we only managed to did through a small part of the room, maybe one-quarter at best.

But back to the treasures.

One dried and aged old envelope yielded a treasure trove of photos and notes from the early years of St. Andrew’s Priory School, where my grandmother grew up as a boarding student throughout her school years.

My sister has started sorting through it.

The old photo album belonged, according to the letter in the envelope, to Miss Abby Marsh, who was one of our mother’s two godmothers. She must have taken the role seriously, because she sent the album and the Dickens book of poetry to our mother after she left Hawaii and moved to New York .

The attached photo is labeled “Priory Students before 1900”. Our grandmother is 2nd from left in back row. 1st on left, front row, is Auntie Emma (Nahaolelua) Dunn. I don’t see Auntie Helen in this photo, so it does not claim to be ALL the women alive when the photo was taken who were students at the Priory before 1900. Nor do I recognize Auntie Alice Lane, but I didn’t know her nearly as well as I knew Auntie Emma.

You might try blog posting it and see if you get any additional ID’s.

This is the photo Bonnie refers to. Our guess is that it was taken in about 1940, give or take several years.

Just click on the photo for a larger version.

This is the second reunion photo of its kind to surface. The first was taken many years earlier, in 1915, and previously shared here.