Read this article in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi
By Devin Kamealoha Forrest
Following the Māhele by Kamehameha III which began in the 1840s, it was necessary to create a system which would record and confirm real property ownership.
Therefore, in 1852, under the constitution and laws passed by the king and legislature, a law was ratified for “The Recording of the Deeds of Transfer,” and under this law the Bureau of Conveyances for the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was founded.
From then until now, not much has changed in the manner and requirements to convey real property as well as to record deeds under the State of Hawaiʻi. The initial law required that you had to record all deeds in the Bureau of Conveyance or that conveyance would be void as it related to those who bought the land without knowledge of the first sale and recorded their deed as stated by the law.
These documents recorded in the Bureau of Conveyances are extremely valuable for us now.
Previous laws required that recording documents contain the reason and method by which a property was conveyed to someone. So Kingdom era land conveyance recordings contain a plethora of information relating to genealogy, history, and rarely used terms.
Today, the public can access the Bureau of Conveyances and all its documents in the Kalanimoku Building in Honolulu to research the genealogy of land from the time of the Māhele to present.
