West Maui Land Court Archive

About the Archive

The copies of Land Court Applications included in this archive are the historical applications of West Maui lands. These applications were lodged with the Land Court at the beginning of the twentieth century and can provide much historical information about nineteenth and early twentieth century West Maui and Hawai'i.

The original idea for this archive arose from the research of Dr. Sydney Iaukea on her book, Keka'a: The Making and Saving of North Beach West Maui. Using the microfilm reels available in Honolulu at the Land Court Office, Dr. Iaukea found searching the thousands of pages, frame by frame, to be daunting -- and at $1/page for copies of the publicly available microfilm reading machines, cost prohibitive. Dr. Iaukea informed the Benefit Fund of her concerns regarding the obstacles to access of these important files that contain useful and important historical and genealogical information to West Maui families. The Benefit Fund, through the assistance of its attorney Lance D. Collins, PhD., then worked diligently for four years to obtain access to digital copies of the historical applications and other documents related to those applications on the Judiciary's microfilm reels.

Some may wonder why applications involving land on Lana'i have been included. Lana'i is included for real property tax purposes with the Lahaina district. The Benefit Fund utilized real property tax records to obtain an exhaustive list of Land Court Applications for West Maui. The Lana'i applications were unwittingly included and to further the purpose of public access to these important records, the Benefit Fund has included them.

The North Beach West Maui Benefit Fund would like to thank the staff of the Land Court, the Chief Staff Attorney of the Hawaii Supreme Court and her office and the members of the IT and Systems Department of the Hawaii State Judiciary for their assistance. Mahalo.