As state cemetery restoration projects continue around Hawai‘i, the Department of Accounting and General Services has plans for a database of people interred statewide.
In 2025, DAGS received $2.3 million from the state Legislature to maintain the eight state cemeteries under the department’s care. Those cemeteries, established before the 1898 annexation of Hawai‘i, have fallen into disrepair over the decades.
But while work to restore those cemeteries — clearing weeds, installing fences and more — has continued throughout 2026, DAGS has plans for an “exhaustive research project” to shed light on exactly who is buried where, Dion Yasui, manager of DAGS’ Cemetery Office, told Aloha State Daily.
Yasui said the project will hopefully allow people to search for a person’s name and find out when and where they were buried. However, that result is still a long way off, and will likely require years of research.
“Makiki Cemetery is pre-territory,” Yasui said. “We have criminals buried here, mass burials from epidemics … Record-keeping was not as paramount in the past.”
About one quarter of all the roughly 5,900 people interred across the eight cemeteries are listed as “unknown” currently. Yasui said no new burials are allowed at the cemeteries, unless a person is provably a direct descendant of someone already buried there.
Yasui said DAGS will collaborate with the state Department of Health to comb through their records and historical death certificates — itself a time-consuming process, as the books are old and delicate and must be handled with great care.
Once DAGS has identified as many gravesites as possible, Yasui said the department will explore the creation of some form of database where people can learn the names of people buried in specific plots.
“Our objective is, if we can’t identify everyone, can we memorialize them in some way?” Yasui said.
In the meantime, the restoration projects at the cemeteries continue. Yasui said each cemetery has been neglected with minimal maintenance for years; he particularly said the Wai‘anae Japanese Cemetery had become a hotbed for “every nefarious activity.”
About 2,000 feet of fencing was installed around the Wai‘anae Japanese Cemetery in September, at a cost of about $200,000. Other maintenance work removed “five to 10 tons of trash,” and cut down trees that were beginning to uproot graves.
In Makiki Cemetery, the largest state cemetery on O‘ahu, Yasui said irrigation and drainage improvements will be made to the site, and the Cemetery Office is considering accessibility improvements to the cemetery footpaths; the cemetery has a steep grade, and Yasui said that many people who visit the old cemeteries are mobility-impaired.
Despite the extensive work necessary at each cemetery, Yasui said no graves will be moved during the project.
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