Tag Archives: Heleualani Cathcart

Students at St. Andrew’s Priory School (about 1905)

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Here’s another vintage photo of students at St. Andrew’s Priory School in Honolulu about 1905, maybe a year or two later. I don’t know the occasion, or if it was just a regular day at school. My grandmother, Heleualani Eva Cathcart, and her sister, Helen Mary Kahooilimoku Cathcart, are both among the students.

The photo, of course, is another glimpse of old Hawaii found among my mother’s papers.

I’ve included a cropped version focusing on the girls. My grandmother is seated on the far right as you look at the photo. Her sister is in the back, standing next to the young girl.

Priory School

closeup

Related:

A Priory Reunion (in 1915)

Another Priory Reunion (probably 1940s)

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

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.

More of my mother’s treasures: Another Priory reunion

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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.

students before 1900

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