Abraham Fornander: Lifetime Influences Which Shaped An Approach To Oral History

Abstract

I first became aware of Abraham Fornander during high-school, when my mother took me to visit his grave at the Makiki Cemetery. She had just finished reading Eleanor Davis' biography of Fornander and was anxious to learn more about him. We walked around the cemetery for a long while, searching the unkempt plots for his name. Although I was not too excited about looking for the grave stone of a man whom I did not know, aspects of his life did intrigue me. As I, he was a Swede living in Hawaii, and like my mother, he had a daughter named Katy. We finally found his grave marker, a tall, white column topped by book and inscribed with the saying "The end crowns the work." Adjacent to his marker was that of his wife, Pinao Alanakapu, and two of their children who died in infancy. That day passed, but the thrill of connecting Fornander's name with a physical manifestation of his life stayed with me. During 1987 I started to think about my final paper for the Honors Program. In an attempt to select a personally relevant thesis topic I wondered what sort of contributions Swedes had made to Hawaii; Fornander's name came to my mind. Reading Davis' Abraham Fornander: A Biography introduced me to his early years in Sweden, to his interest in publishing and printing, and research in Hawaiian history. Her work also produced questions for me. What would inspire him to write down and translate Hawaiian chants and legends? Could there be a connection between Fornander's early years in Sweden and his later concern for Hawaii and its history? I believed there was.