Miriam Auhea Kekāuluohi Crowningburg

• 1. The Guardian At Kawaiahaʻo

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  Miriam Auhea Kekāuluohi Crowningburg lived long enough to watch a kingdom disappear. She saw the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, the Republic of Hawaii in 1894, and annexation to the United States in 1898. Through all of it, she kept watch over a single tomb on the grounds of the Kawaiahaʻo Church. The grave belonged to her cousin, King Lunalilo. Who was this aging chiefess, trusted to guard a dead king's bones while his nation came apart? Why was her bloodline considered a possible claim to the throne itself? And how did a family that once hid the bones of Kamehameha I end up tending the resting places of Hawaiian royalty for generations after?

• 2. Keepers Of The Bones

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  Hoʻolulu and his brother Hoapili were chosen to conceal the bones of King Kamehameha I in a secret hiding place after his death. That single act of trust shaped the family that Auhea was born into. Hoʻolulu was her great-grandfather, the son of Kameʻeiamoku, one of the royal twins who advised Kamehameha I in his conquest of the islands. From that line, her family became the traditional kahu, or guardians, of the royal burial sites. Auhea herself took up the role in later life. She became the kahu of the Lunalilo Mausoleum, the personal family tomb of her cousin. When she died, her cousin High Chiefess Maria Beckley Kahea replaced her there, another scion of the same Hoʻolulu line. Hoʻolulu Street, near Kapahulu in Honolulu, carries the ancestor's name because Auhea chose it.

• 3. A Claim To The Crown

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  It was alleged that Auhea was betrothed to Lunalilo but eloped instead with Jesse Crowningburg. The story marks her as more than a distant relation. Her grandmother was the half-sister of the elder Miriam Auhea Kekāuluohi, the Kuhina Nui who ruled under Kamehameha III from 1839 to 1845. That made the younger Auhea a second cousin of King Lunalilo and her namesake's heir in name. After Lunalilo died during his short reign, Auhea was considered to have a claim to the throne herself. Her descent from a collateral line of the House of Kamehameha later made her granddaughters possible claimants to the Crown Lands during the Territorial days. When Kalākaua was elected monarch in 1874, Hawaiians loyal to Queen Emma challenged his genealogy openly. Auhea, along with Ruth Keʻelikōlani, publicly acknowledged the House of Kalākaua to quiet that opposition.

• 4. Two Marriages

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  Jesse Crowningburg was a German-American settler who collected taxes for Lahaina and Wailuku on Maui. Auhea married him sometime before 1859. They had three children, including William Charles Keʻeaumoku Crowningburg, who died in 1881, and Elizabeth Keomailani Crowningburg, who lived from 1859 to 1887. A third child, Lydia Kalola, died at Lahaina on the 21st of November 1859, aged eight months and twenty-seven days. The marriage ended in divorce. On the 20th of January 1873, Auhea remarried to Paul Kamai, a maternal uncle of Helen Manaiula Lewis Isenberg and her half-sister Abigail Kuaihelani Campbell. Their son, who carried the names Albert Edward Kameeiamoku Kamai and Charles Harold Kameeiamoku-Kaiheekai, died young. Her family line would continue through the two children of her first marriage.

• 5. The Line That Followed

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  William Edward Bishop Kaiheʻekai Taylor, born in 1882, was the grandson Bernice Pauahi Bishop unsuccessfully tried to hānai, or adopt. He served as a trustee for the Lunalilo Home. In 1947 he became the kahu of the Royal Mausoleum at Mauna ʻAla, serving until his death in 1956. Nearly all the kahu of Mauna ʻAla since have descended from Auhea and her ancestor Hoʻolulu. The exceptions are Taylor's widow and the kumu hula ʻIolani Luahine. Her most controversial descendant carried a very different reputation. Sammy Amalu, who lived from 1917 to 1986, was a longtime columnist at The Honolulu Advertiser and a self-proclaimed royal. He titled himself High Chief Kapiikauinamoku, Prince of Keawe and Duke of Konigsberg. In the 1940s he tried to buy several Waikiki hotels with phony checks and landed in jail. Under that same alias he later wrote columns tracing the genealogy of Hawaii's aliʻi families, including his ancestress Auhea.