A Civil Beat Reporter Stumbled On Boxes Of Hawaii Letters Stored Away, Unseen, Since The 1800s

Kirstin Downey is no stranger to the dusty old tomes and thick stacks of papers that reside in state and national archives.

The veteran journalist has written two books, a biography of groundbreaking former labor secretary Frances Perkins and a biography of controversial Queen Isabella of Spain.

About six years ago, Downey was deep into researching another book, this one about Kauai’s chief, King Kaumualii, who reigned in the early 1800s. She decided to make a thorough search of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., for any information she could turn up on Hawaii’s ruling families and asked to see anything related to Hawaii from that time period that the U.S. State Department might have collected.

Much to her surprise, archivists presented her with three boxes labeled as “Estates of Deceased Americans,” tightly stuffed with what would turn out to be more than 160 packets containing some of the last possessions of people who had died in the Hawaiian Islands between 1830 and 1900.

Americans were considered foreigners in Hawaii until the islands became a territory in 1900 so whatever they owned at the time of their death was sorted out by a U.S. consul who often sold items if necessary to pay off debt. Whatever was left, including letters, photographs and other assets not easily liquidated, were put into packets and sent to the State Department for delivery to next of kin on the mainland.

But many of them never made it. They became dead letters that were ultimately shipped to the National Archives’ storage facility in College Park, Maryland.

“I opened the boxes and I started to go through them and it was such an eerie experience,” Downey says. “A lot of them had never been opened. Ever. Some not in 150 years.”

The packets are the basis of our new series, “Dead Letters,” that continues into next week. But the stories also rely on other historical research including old newspaper articles, court records and ancestry documents to find out as much as we could about how these people lived — and died.

Downey says a lot of the packets were really just items wrapped with brown butcher paper and tied with fraying twine.

As you’ll see in the many photos Downey took to accompany this series, the paper packets were very fragile and she had to be careful opening each one. She soon realized that the material wasn’t relevant to her book on the Kauai chief. But it would be a great story when she could take the time to thoroughly explore the records.

So the boxes went back into storage and Downey returned home to Honolulu. She mentioned what she’d found one night when we were having dinner at Kona Brewing in Hawaii Kai. I was instantly a huge fan of this story idea and we made plans for Downey to return to the archives on one of her next trips to D.C.

But then — the coronavirus pandemic swept in and the best laid plans, as they say, were put on hold.

Like many businesses and agencies, the National Archives closed to the public. When they reopened to researchers like Downey a couple years later, it was with shortened hours and tight security. That made it more difficult to take on what turned out to be a lengthy methodical examination and cataloging of long dead letters.

Last year, after spending weeks reporting on the wildfires in Maui, Downey was able to get back to Washington, D.C., and the storage facility in College Park.

It took a couple of weeks to sort through the fragments of what remained of people’s lives — hand-written letters, faded photographs, old financial ledgers. Sometimes an object would fall onto the marble table with a loud clatter.

“I felt like I was looking into open graves,” Downey says. “This was so personal, I’m holding these people’s objects in my hands. I felt chicken skin.”

The packets were a real mess, Downey says. Some appeared to be intact, with the name of the deceased written neatly on it and the contents inside matching the name. But other items, including many photographs, were just dumped in a folder in a box making it impossible to tell who they belonged to.

“There was a strange carelessness about these records that had been compiled about people’s last days,” Downey says, adding that it was often not possible to figure out a person’s story from what was in the packet. “I was increasingly feeling sorrow for them because the last things they owned had not been treated with respect.”

But Downey did begin to suspect that there was a lot of theft going on when it came to people who died in the islands far from their families who weren’t there to watch out for them.

“I really started to feel like something was wrong,” she says. That, combined with the suggestion that she see if there was a story to be broken out on Lahaina, prompted her to pull a different set of records about the U.S. consul service, the officials that were sent to Hawaii to represent the U.S. government’s interests.

In those records she discovered a report by one government official that detailed his investigation into widespread corruption on the part of some consuls, a story she tells in this series.

“It is the foundation of the corruption that still exists in Hawaii,” Downey says. “People could do things and wouldn’t be caught because of distance to Hawaii.”

Once she’d gone through the archives, Downey set out to find out as much as she could about many of the people whose records she’d examined. She began to peruse newspapers.com, the online archive of hundreds of newspapers that dates back decades. She used ancestry.com records and Find A Grave to locate families. And she looked for any signs that an estate had been probated or that real estate had been sold so she could then go to court records and community public records sites.

Downey also paid numerous visits to the Hawaii State Archives, the Mission House museum and the Hawaiian Historical Society for these stories.

What started with three boxes of obscure records that had been lost to time has now become an official project of the National Archives. Downey says some archivists became eager to help as they saw what she was uncovering. At least one became fascinated with the project and took it on.

Now, Downey says, the dead letters are going through a conservation process that involves sorting the mishmash of documents into separate folders properly labeled with the names of individuals. Delicate items are being put into polyester sleeves to be protected.

“This will be of interest to future historians,” she predicts.