Friday, April 16, 2010

Cousins Collaborate ( and more relationships appear!)

Washington Place, Honolulu

Last week Leah, from "Internet Genealogist" and I collaborated on a story that involved our great-great aunts meeting in Hawaii in 1848. Her distant relation, Estelle Charlotte Mott, was a teenaged boarder at my distant relation’s (4x great aunt), Mary L. (Jones) Dominis’s boarding house in Honolulu. This story came about because a third person, Edna Haley Pace, wrote to me about my blog postings on the history of the Dominis family home, Washington Place, in Hawaii. The internet played a big part in putting this together, and of course, Leah and I used our blogs on the internet to write two complementary stories.

Soon after the stories were posted, I received a lot of email, and several were from other bloggers, such as Carol from “Reflections from the Fence”, who told me that her husband was also a Haley descendant. The Nova Scotia Haley/Healy family is part of my and Edna Haley Pace’s family tree. We are all descendants of Comfort Haley, born 1754 in Massachusetts and died 15 May 1821 in Chebogue, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. My great great grandmother was Mary Etta Healy, Comfort’s great granddaughter.

Also, Barbara Poole, at “Life from the Roots” had a distant relation, Anthony Ten Eyck, who was also a boarder at Washington Place, and in fact, he is famous for having suggested to Mrs. Dominis that her new home in Honolulu looked like Mount Vernon, so she should call it “Washington Place”. This name stuck when King Kamehameha IV agreed with the name and so it went down in history. Anthony Ten Eyck was in Honolulu serving as commissioner to Hawaii for President Polk, until he was replaced by Charles Eames in December 1848.

I have passed along Essie’s memoir to members of the Dominis family, descendants of Mrs. Mary Dominis, and to the curator at Washington Place. The curator wrote “the Mott Diary, a significant document that records and important slice of time…I love it…green shutters, pantelettes, contraband custards and stolen pies!” She also said that the museum has copies of letters of reproach “regarding John Dominis and the young Mott girls…” We can’t wait to see these copies! Another possible blog post in the making!

This story and the internet seem to have been made for each other! Please stay tuned to "Internet Genealogist" as Leah posts the rest of Essie's journal, including more pages about her life in Honolulu in 1848.

My story about Essie and Mrs. Dominis is at http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/04/cousins-collaborate-on-genealogy-story.html

Leah's post with the first part of Essie's story in Honolulu is at http://shbwgen.blogspot.com/2010/04/transcription-mott-memoir-part-11.html

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Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

3 comments:

  1. This is just so fascinating - I'm glued to Nutfield Genealogy and The Internet Genealogist these days!

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  2. Thank you Heather for including my connection, our emails regarding that was pretty funny. You are giving us a lot of nice reading material.

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  3. Heather,
    Amazing! This is why the internet has become so vital to genealogy. All these connections and stories may never have been made without it!

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