Tag Archives: Helen Yonge Lind

Liliha “profit sharing” stamp

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Just when I thought there were no more piles of “stuff,” I opened another drawer in a small, 4-drawer cabinet. Two drawers stuffed with articles clipped from the newspapers, including many columns about this Hawaii and Hawaiian dating back as far as the 1960s. And obituaries. I guess when you live into your 90s, you see a lot of friends, and people who you knew or knew of, pass along before you. My mother clipped obituaries. She has obits of family and friends, of pioneering people, of community figures, of people she went to school with, or their brothers, sisters, parents, children, etc.

And then some goodies, like these tiny little stamps. What are they?

The read, “Profit sharing stamp,” “Liliha”. 10 cts.

They are small. Old.

Anybody have an idea? Please share.

Liliha

UPDATE: Other remnants turned up in one of the other drawers. Here are three of them, including old Royal Stamps and Blue Chip Stamps. Notice the ones at the bottom, which are also marked “profit sharing.” So I’m guessing these were early trading stamps that competed against the larger or better known brands.

stamps

Photo: The English Sisters at the Priory (likely pre-1900)

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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!]

St. Andrews Priory

Notes from my mother’s search for her Hawaiian ancestors

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We’re getting closer to completing the job of sorting through all the papers and other “stuff” left in my parents’ house after my mom, Helen Lind, passed away in January. I keep thinking that all the “finds” have been made, and then another stack of papers turns out to contain a gem.

This time its an incomplete set of notes my mother compiled on the Hawaiian side of her family, “last revised 1994,” according to a hand-written notation at the top. There’s a link to the document down at the bottom of this entry.

I think it might be of interest because it demonstrates the difficulties of tracking back through Hawaiian genealogies.

Along with the family lore are observations on the research process.

Here’s what she wrote right up front.

I found it frustrating interviewing old Hawaiians because they were thinking “Hawaiian style” where their extended family included people they identified as “cousin” or “auntie” who were not blood relatives. On the other hand, my thinking was “haole style,” intent on seeking those related by blood.

Then she went on to some of the special problems in tracing Hawaiian families, especially back into the period when Hawaiians had only one name, given at birth. “Unlike haole practice, the same names were used for both male and female,” she explains.

Sometime in the late 19th century, Hawaiians adopted the haole custom of using a surname or family name in addition to their given name. A major difficulty in tracing old Hawaiian genealogies is that all of the siblings in one family did not take the same family surname. It is not uncommon to find four brothers using four different surnames as happened in our family history. In Hawaiian culture, the given name was the most important in identifying a person for it usually had some special meaning.

Later, another lesson, as she tried to make sense of family lore as told by an elderly relative that doesn’t match up with the historical timeline. She took down the information, but realized later that she didn’t push on questionable aspects.

“I was very new at genealogy in the 1950s and did not question what I was being told for it seemed impolite,” she writes.

That’s a lesson reporters have to learn and relearn all the time, I think.

On what is marked as page 9, my mother tells of learning that her great grandparents were believed to have died at Kalaupapa, something her mother and aunt had never spoken of. My sister has been digging further into this, including a recent trip to Kalaupapa, and hopefully she will chime in with an update on what is known, as well as the current “best guesses.”

I don’t know if my mother updated this information. I think it’s likely. If so, one of these days I’ll find her research and share it.

By the way, the charts at the end were intended to run left to right, but appear instead simply page by page. So they will likely require a bit more energy to digest, if you get that far.

–> Read “Our Hawaiian Ancestors” by Helen Yonge Lind. Last revised 1994.

Another “find”: Notes on Hawaiian medicinal plants

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I was back digging through some of the last unexplored piles of my mothers papers, clippings, and other items stacked haphazardly in boxes, or just left in piles, in a storeroom off the garage in the old Kahala house where my parents lived for over 70 years.

And, in the process, I turned up another treasure, a few pages of typed notes on Hawaiian medicines, based on conversations with her mother, Heleualani Cathcart Yonge, just two months before she died in the summer of 1959. There are also references to additional details gathered from a a few family friends (you’ll see some of them mention in the notes).

There are at least 17 plants listed, with brief notes on how they were prepared and what they were used for. Some are relatively familiar today, such as Noni, but others obscure.

Click here to read the notes on Hawaiian medicinal plants.

Here’s a sample from my mom’s notes:

Many years ago when my father was very ill and there wasn’t a Dr. in Honolulu that could find anything wrong with him, some friend of my mothers made an api or tonic to build up the general health. This is my mother’s description: Ingredients were coconut, noni, ini and the juice of the red & white striped sugar cane. This was all ground or p ounded and the juice forced out. All of the refuse from the ingredients was tied in a bundle and disposed of out in the ocean by one person with no one else around (hold-over from kahuna days).

Did it work? She doesn’t say.

And don’t miss the anecdotes on the last page, drawn from my mother’s memory of a summer spent with the Whittington family in Kau (there were a couple of Whittington girls among her friends while at Kamehameha. My mother graduated in the Class of 1931.