About Our Collection

Photographic images provide visual documentation of Sacred Hearts personnel, the activities they undertook, and the communities they served throughout the province. These images are found in many different formats: glass plate negatives, film negatives, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, black-and-white and color prints; 35mm color slides; and lantern slides.

Objects represented in the collection include religious articles and ecclesiastical vestments used during liturgical rites of the Church. There are also tools which were employed for the building of churches and dwellings. Furniture, oil portraits, objets d’art, and relics associated with Father Damien also form the patrimony of the Sacred Hearts Congregation.

Letters, diaries, manuscripts, architectural drawings, organizational records, scrapbooks, and ephemera comprise the archives collection. Some of these documents date back to the early years of the nineteenth century, when Sacred Hearts missionaries were establishing the Catholic Mission in Hawaii.

The provincial archives contains a reference library of both rare and recently published books. Early publications include those printed by the Catholic Mission Press in Honolulu, from 1841 to 1889. They include Hawaiian-language gospels, catechisms, manuals, periodicals, history books, and hymnals. More recent publications in the collection include biographies on the founders of the Sacred Hearts Congregation, Father Damien, and others; history books on Sacred Hearts history, spirituality, and devotional practices; and commemorative parish booklets.