Saturday and Aloha

Remember our program this upcoming Saturday with Tresa Tatyrek. The topic is researching church records. Library doors open at 10:00. Program begins at 10:30 and lasts about and hour. We'll be in the Dulaney Meeting room of the Roy and Helen Hall Library as usual.

Aloha. I have just returned from a vacation in Hawaii. This trip is a "must do before you die"!. I stopped in at the Hawaii State Library which is the headquarters of the Hawaii State Public Library System. All the public libraries on each island are a part of this system. The one in Honolulu on the island of Oahu is where the records are kept you might want for genealogy research. The original Hawaiian people are the Menehune and they didn't have a written language so forget tracing your ancestry to them. In fact, there was no written language at all until the Europeans came along in the 1700s. Starting with records in the 1800s you can find lots of British and Scottish. To trace your ancestry to Hawaiian is the equivalent of tracing to American Indian in the mainland states. There are certain rights and priviledges afforded to those people, including owning some land that can only be sold to them. The islanders now are a mix of all the polynesian islands - Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawaii, and what is now New Zealand. Hawaii has a USGenWeb page so go on line and start searching.