Category Archives: Genealogy/family

Remembering my mother on Mother’s Day

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This is a repost from another Mother’s Day several years ago.

This was a year that would have created problems for us.

Mother’s Day on May 10. My mom’s birthday on May 15. The problem was that we lived across the island and had busy professional lives in town. Two separate celebrations in the same week was hard for us to fit in, but the background guilt of letting one of these occasions go unrecognized was also hard to cope with. I recall that we ended up with one event, lunch or dinner, but with presents attributed to both occasions.

That seemed to work relatively well.

Musing about my mother….

I wasn’t home schooled, but I was definitely home educated by my mother, Helen Yonge Lind.

She encouraged me to read, and helped me break the rules when the librarian at the Kaimuki Library said I was too young to venture into the adult book section.

She also gave me the best single piece of advice ever, which I later found applicable far beyond its original context.

When she finally got tired of my endless questions how to make this or that in her tiny kitchen, she finally told me: “If you can read, you can cook.”

And then she shared her cookbook, a small three-ring binder with recipes carefully typed, then revised with handwritten notes based on experience, changing quality of ingredients, etc.

Now I could look recipes up myself.

“If you can read, you can cook.”

Sage advice.

I’ve later applied that in many other areas of life. Reading is a core skill. Master it. Love it. You’ll go a long way.

This photo was taken on the back steps from the living room of my parent’s house in Kahala, leading down onto the lanai and the back yard. It’s a scene that no longer exists, because when we renovated the old house after her death, we built a back deck at the same level as the house, rather than a lanai at ground level.

In any case, I can still remember this scene, repeated many times, the anticipation when turning the crank on the little music box and waiting for the punch line, “Pop! Goes the weasel!” Somehow knowing how it was going to end didn’t take away from the pleasure I got from it each and every time.

My mother died at the end of January 2013, a few months short of her 99th birthday.

The Meda List, continued

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I thought that my post over the weekend, “The Meda List“, had found the answer to the origin of my wife’s name.

Of course, I gave myself some wiggle room, adding a suggestive sentence at the end of the post:

I haven’t started to claw my way back through the next generation or two of the Morgan and Bishop families, looking for more appearances of the names Almeda or Meda that would further confirm this new origin story.

I was itching to peel back another layer, but instead of starting on the Morgan and Bishop families that had married Menardi men, I decided to take a look at the first Menardi to come to the U.S., Joseph Sebastian Menardi, who sometimes is referred to as Giuseppe Sebastiani Menardi. Late in his life, he married Harriet Granger, who was considerably younger.

And I quickly learned Harriet Granger was the daughter of Roderick Granger Sr. and, are you ready? Almeda Dunlap! Suddenly there was another independent “Meda” to add at the top of the Meda List, challenging my initial answer.

Here’s my problem at this point. There is a lot of potential slippage in this whole story. The genealogical sites use their own search algorithms that don’t always return the same result when the same search terms are used. This makes it harder to replicate findings, or to find bits of information that I recall seeing but didn’t think important enough at the time to include in my notes. Searches in Newspapers.com are subject to similar frustrating peculiarities.

I’m going to have to set this aside for a while until after my upcoming surgery. But I’m sure my curiosity will lure me back to it over the next couple of months.

The Meda List

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I’m choosing to stay at arms length from digging into current events and issues that I would normally be eager to investigate. Somewhat fragile health is frustrating, and I’ve decided to reduce the stress and anxiety by just putting these things aside for a while and looking elsewhere for puzzles to challenge my curiosity, chasing questions of less social consequence.

Here’s an example.

Meda, my wife’s name, is unusual, and I have to admit that we have never known much about it’s origin.

Meda was named after her maternal grandmother, Meda Mendardi Renton.

Given Meda Menardi’s Italian heritage, we long held the belief that “Meda” was an Italian name. It sounds Italian, and it’s easy to imagine it rolling off the tongue in an Italian accent.

But as I was fiddling around this week, I asked several AI assistants if “Meda” is an Italian name. There was general agreement it is not considered Italian nor found much in Italy.

Meda is named after her grandmother, Meda Menardi, shown here with her husband, James Lewis Renton, on their wedding day in Sept. 1921.

Then I found a list buried in one of my digital archives in which Meda’s grandmother, prior to her death in 1980, wrote out the names every “Meda” in the family that she could remember. She placed herself as #3 in the Meda list, which appears at the bottom of this post.

In the #2 spot was her aunt, her father’s sister, Almeda Menardi (married name Rising). So she was likely named for this aunt, still consistent Meda being a traditional name in her Italian family.

I then tracked back to the first Menardi to come to the United States, Joseph Sebastian Menardi, sometimes identified as Giuseppe Sebastian Menardi. I’ve had trouble dating his entry into the United States, but it appears to have been in the late 1700s or early 1800s. Family lore has it that he was drawn into late 18th century Italian and European revolutionary movements at the time of the French Revolution, and was ultimately forced to flee. Whether that’s true or not is, well, unsettled.

Genealogical records suggest he joined other early pioneer settlers of the towns of Wysox and Towanda, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, located in the Susquehanna River Valley along the New York line, and his descendants intermarried with other pioneer families in that part of Pennsylvania.

But then a noticed a problem with the Mendardi origin story.

Joseph Sebastian Menardi had a son, Andrew Elijah Menardi, born in 1826. Andrew was the grandfather of Meda’s grandmother. Is your brain having trouble with the generations? It took me days to wrap my head around the information without getting hopelessly confused and losing track of generations.

But here’s the thing. The name “Meda” doesn’t appear to have been handed down within the Menardi family, but from the family of Andrew Mendardi’s wife, Mary Lemora Mendardi, born Morgan.

Mary Morgan Menardi had a sister, Harriet Almeda Morgan, born in 1818 to parents Harry Morgan (1790-1872) and Harriet Bishop (1794-1868). And Meda’s grandmother identified this Harriet Almeda Morgan, whose married name was Fowler, as the first Meda.

I haven’t started to claw my way back through the next generation or two of the Morgan and Bishop families, looking for more appearances of the names Almeda or Meda that would further confirm this new origin story.

It was only at this point that I recalled an aside suggested by one of the AI assistants that I had initially discounted because it was inconsistent with the Menardi thesis.

In English-speaking regions—particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries—Meda became a popular diminutive for Almeda. Parents would often name a child Almeda on official records while using Meda as the “call name” or everyday nickname. This pairing was especially common in American pioneer and rural communities, where Almeda saw its peak popularity.

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Repost: My mother’s memories of Haleiwa

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In the months following the death of my mother, Helen Yonge Lind, in early 2013, just months before her 99th birthday, I found lots of interesting items in her jumbled collection of papers, including correspondence, typed or handwritten notes, photos, and miscellaneous newspaper clippings.

This is a slightly-edited version of an entry originally posted in November 2013. It describes time she spent living in Haleiwa as a girl.

She moved to Haleiwa with her father in 1922 after he took a job as a collector for Mutual Telephone Company, the predecessor of Hawaiian Telephone. My mother’s version of the story was that she was assigned to do housekeeping for her father.

Her older sister, Marguerite, stayed in Waipahu with their mother and their newborn brother.

They lived in Haleiwa for three years before her father was able to transfer back to a position in Waipahu, according to her notes.

Sometime after her 90th birthday in 2004, my mother sat down and typed out notes of what she recalled of that time.

For three years of my childhood in the 1920s, I lived in Haleiwa in the makai section close to the grand old Haleiwa Hotel and the Anahulu Bridge. Even at the tender age of 10, there was no mystery about the names. I understood perfectly that I lived in Haleiwa in the district of Waialua. The town that bore the name of the district Waialua was several miles distant surrounding the sugar mill and plantation housing. I doubt if that particular area was actually called Waialua before the advent of the plantation. When the plantations of Waialua, Waianae and Ewa were established, each was given the name of its district, not the Hawaiian place-name of the location.

Although located in Haleiwa, the Waialua District Court House and the Waialua Elementary School were so named because they served the entire district. That was the Waialua District court and the Waialua District school. Some of my school friends came every day from the banana farms of Kawaihapai and from Puuiki out beyond the Waialua mill. Next to the school, out on Kaiaka Point, was the Waialua Fresh Air Camp, now a state recreational area.

On the 1841 Wilkes map prepared by the U.S. Exploring expedition of 1838-1841, the various districts of Oahu are shown with Waialua extending across the entire North Shore.

Over the years some names of places have changed or new ones have been adopted. I don’t know when it happened, but Paumalu, the “beach of the sneaky waters,” disappeared and Sunset Beach entered the scene. Other place names well known years ago have been forgotten. Puuiki and Kawaihapi don’t even appear on current road maps.

It was many years ago, but I still recall a few of the names of people I knew in Haleiwa. My best friend and constant companion was Jenny Woodd, who became an entertainer and the grandmother of currently popular singer, Amy Hanaialii Gilliom. Jenny’s brother, Johnny Woodd, was a well known local swimmer in his day. There was John Kukea who chose the career of a fire fighter and a water sports enthusiast. One of his sons is connected with the Kamehameha Schools. Tommy Cleghorn sat behind me in the 5th grade and delighted in poking my back with sharpened pencils. He went on to Punahou and became an anthropologist with the Bishop Museum.

The Mahoe family lived on a rise beyond the Anahulu river. A granddaughter is Marie Adams McDonald, an artist and the author of the beautiful definitive book about the Hawaiian lei. Across the street from us was the Takahashi family. I don’t remember if they had a store, but I believe they were the owners of the community furo which I remember well. On a number of occasions, my sister and I donned our kimono, placed a bar of soap in our little bamboo baskets, grabbed a towel and trekked across the street to bathe and bask in the warm, soothing waters of the furo amongst people of all ages. The Laird family lived on the banks of the Anahulu near the old missionary Emerson house. Years later we met again when one of the daughters and I worked together in the same department at UH.

I wonder if many residents today are aware there was once a thriving glass bottom boat business owned and operated by a man named Jenkins. His boats that took paying customers out into the bay to view reef life were moored next to the bridge on the lowest slope of the hotel grounds. As far as I know, he was not married and left no descendants.

I have two outstanding memories of the area. One was a tidal wave around 1922-25. A couple ran up the street shouting, “the kai, the kai” (the sea, the sea) and people flocked to the beach. We stood on a high area above the sandy beach to watch. I have a mental picture of the water in the bay receding and then suddenly rising into a high wall of water pushing toward the shore. There weren’t any curling waves as portrayed in surfing films. The ocean seemed to just swell up and then move forward. Then someone hustled us inland so I did not see what happened next. Nor do I remember if there was any property damage.

Another vivid memory is one of ethereal beauty, the spectacular and captivating sight of the lotus ponds in full bloom. The scene was so impressive, it has remained with me through all the years.

Helen Y. Lind

Kahala