Edit: originally posted at genealogy

My great great grandmother is the woman in the center, with the funny hat on. I've seen this group of riders in various books, dressed exactly the same, so I know it's from the same day/parade/event, but the date given is June 11, 1900 in one book and when I ordered the picture from the museum, the date on the back said 1900-1910. She would have been 8 months pregnant on June 11, 1900. To complicate things, the man in the white outfit next to her is in a photo at the archives dated 1907, he has the same exact outfit on & I just found a 'moving picture' with this same group on a dvd. Their with a bunch of old clips called the Edison Films, 1898, but only one clip (the worst of the bunch) has the date of 1898 and all of them have the copyright of 1906. Now, my cousin on the mainland, emailed me this:

"Robert K. Bonine made a video 1906-7, titled Pa'u riders (some sources say 07). He worked for Edison. He made a lot of old videos in Hawaii and went to Hawaii in 1906...found stuff on him. There is a reference to it at the Manoa website and they say it's in the Library of Congress."

So if you were trying to date this photograph, what conclusion would you come to?
I'm also wondering about that hat. Is there a name for that style & when it was popular?



'Moving Picture' of the same group:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6bi5cpGIq0

Since we were talking about it at work, when I got home I decided to do a little research on the internet. There's so much theories and speculation and some genetic evidence points to one particular origin, but then the female side genetic evidence counters that. THEN, you get some native american dna mixed in with the Easter Islanders, blah, blah, blah...So you turn to the actual scientific research and come across stuff like this:

"The Y-chromosome data highlight a distinctive gender-modulated pattern of differential gene flow in the history of Polynesia"

What the fuck does that mean?

Many feel the muumuu is an endangered species

Designer Mamo Howell says pants doomed the loose-fitting garment

By Burl Burlingame

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 13, 2009

There was a time in Hawaii when, as if they had been assigned uniforms, every elementary-school teacher and bank teller wore a muumuu. Every day.

Those every-days are long past. The muumuu or mu'umu'u or "Mother Hubbard" or whatever you like to call it might be one of Hawaii's endangered species.Think. When was the last time you saw one that wasn't on Auntie?Let define terms. The muumuu is the full-length, flowing A-line dress that falls from the yoke and shoulder, generally brightly colored, and invented by the missionaries to allow Hawaiian women freedom of movement without showing any skin.

Read more....


My grandma (2nd from right), in her holoku at church. The holoku eventually morphed into the much more popular muumuu.