A story by Kirsten Downey in Civil Beat this week described the situation of a cemetery in Pearl City now in shambles after being abandoned, and repeatedly vandalized, for years, or perhaps decades (“Vandals Nearly Destroyed This Central Oahu Cemetery. Now The Community Is Standing Up For The Dead“).

It’s a story that has been of interest to my family for a number of years because its predecessor, Loch View Cemetery, was the burial place of George Galbraith, who died in 1904. His estate, held in trust for over 100 years, was eventually valued at more than $60 million, and was finally distributed to the beneficiaries by the end of 2013.

My great-grandfather, Robert William Cathcart, was a friend and associate of Galbraith and, according to family lore, was the non-lawyer who wrote his will. Although records show Galbraith was buried at Loch View, nothing remains there to mark the grave.

My late sister, Bonnie (Lind) Stevens, moved from her longtime home in California to Hawaii after her husband’s death in 2007. She had inherited my mother’s deep interest in genealogy and local history, and one of her early projects was to find Galbraith’s grave. She tried. She had to battle bureaucracies and fragmentary records. But she slowly pieced together pieces of the puzzle.

I’m going to share her findings over the next day or two in hopes there are details here that might assist those trying to rescue the cemetery and the souls put to rest there.

Here’s Bonnie’s first installment.

Where’s George Galbraith now?

Galbraith was buried at Loch View Cemetery on the shores of Pearl Harbor. Most burials in the cemetery were moved to make way for the widening of Kamehameha Highway some 50 years ago. According to Nanette Napoleon, director of the Cemetery Research Project:

The cemetery, as it exists today, only has 12 identifiable markers. George Galbraith is not one of them. There was at one time 562 other people buried there, but they were all removed and relocated. I do not know where they were relocated. However, I do have the list of people who were disinterred, but you ancestor, George Galbraith is not on this list. This leads me to conclude that if he is still there he is in an unmarked grave. This is very common in our old graveyards.

According to the authors of Next Stop Honolulu, “Oahu Railway created the first planned housing development in the Islands. Called Pearl City, it offered house lots and featured Remond Park, a large picnic grounds and dance pavilion. In 1901 the line also created Loch View, a private cemetery overlooking the waters of Pearl Harbor.”

There’s not much left of it today.

In November 2007, David Dickinson (a Galbraith beneficiary from British Columbia) accompanied Bonnie on a search for the remains of the cemetery.

This is what they found.

Bonnie Stevens

No sign of Galbraith headstone

800 block of Kamehameha Highway