Another little bit of history, again found among my mother’s papers, captioned: “The English Sisters at the Priory.”
That’s St. Andrew’s Priory in downtown Honolulu.
I don’t know when it was taken. My grandmother was a student and boarded at the Priory from the early 1890’s until after she finished high school in the early 1900s. Even after graduating, she continued living at the Priory until she married.
Her mother, my great grandmother, Kina Kahooilimoku, also attended the Priory a generation before.
Coincidentally, today I turned up a lined page of yellow paper on which my mother wrote out several bits of family history.
Here’s a relevant fragment:
Kina, the daughter of Kahooilimoku and Heleualani, was my pure Hawaiian grandmother. I never knew her, for she died in 1913, th year before I was born. I have two pictures of her in which she appears to be a small woman, somewhat short, with a pleasant face, nice features and rather fair complexion.
The story goes that when Kina was a young girl, she was sent to Honolulu to attend St. Andrew’s Priory and lived close by with the Brickwood fanily. The store continues that she was seduced by one of the Brickwood sons, and returned to Hana where she bore a son who was named James Kahele. Photographs show James as a handsome young man. He married and raised a family in Puunui, near Wylie Street.
These English Sisters? I don’t know. Perhaps someone will be able to tell approximate time period based on their clothing.
And don’t miss either of the dogs.
Click on the photo for a larger version.
[Oops! If you visited here early this morning, you may have been surprised to click on the photo and get a photo of my mother instead of the English Sisters. That happens when I fail to put the correct link into a stock format that I have set up. Sorry for the mistake!]
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Clicking the picture doesn’t get a larger version, it gets a very nice picture of your mother.
Thanks for this Ian. Wonderful history. My daughter went to Priory as did about 20 SE Asian refugee children I helped send there. I will share this with them.
It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be bundled up in all the clothing you see in photos of 19th-century Hawaii. It’s a wonder anyone survived into old age.
I know this is a bit late, but that picture is of the “Old Priory,” which is DEFINITELY pre-1900s. Judging by the architecture of the building in the background, this was before the main building (currently Kennedy Hall) became closer to what it is today. I’m pretty sure it’s anywhere between the late 1860s and 1890s.
The sisters in this photograph are Sister Beatrice Rogers SHT (1829-1921) in the centre and Sister Albertina Polybank SHT (1840-1930). Their religious community was the Society of the Holy Trinity, an Anglican community whose ‘mother house’ was at Ascot Priory in Berkshire, UK. The community sent sisters to Hawaii in the 1860s after a request from Queen Emma who had visited Ascot. The community was unable to sustain the mission in Hawaii after the death of Sister Phoebe in 1890, but two sisters would not return to Britain and stayed teaching at the school for many years. The two sisters are those in the photograph. The school was taken over by another community (from the USA) when the two sisters became too old to continue but they lived out their retirement in Hawaii and died there. I think this photograph would be after 1890.
Thank you so much for those details. These are the sisters who raised my grandmother and her sister from the time they were just a few years old up through school and, in my grandmother’s case, until her marriage several years after graduating.