French Polynesia Genealogy

French Polynesia lies south of Hawaii and east of Tonga and Samoa. It is composed of 118 islands. From north to south they are Marquesas Islands, Tuamotu Islands, Gambier Islands, Society Islands, and Austral or Tubuai Islands. Papeete, Tahiti is the capital. The population is about 92,000. About half of the people live on the island of Tahiti.

Customs When we put our family history together, we may not have many dates to work with. Because of this, we need to study the history of the islands where our ancestors lived by starting with the historical background for the island group of our ancestors. Historical dates from these publications and from the Internet can be used to estimate the dates of our ancestors’ lives more accurately. See the Bibliography at the end of this guide for a list of Internet resources with further information.

“The Sacred Land of Hawaiki” which some Maoris refer to as the place where their ancestors came from is Raiatea, in the Leeward Islands. They call it “Hawaiki Nui” and it has a place on it called “Taputaputea,” which is a holy place. It is a small triangle of land and it contains a wooden platform which is built high and has three levels. The levels represent to the Islanders what we think of as Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial glories. (There is a picture of one of these “prayer platforms” in Cole and Jensen’s Israel in the Pacific, Page 146.)

Each island had a taputaputea, which would face either north, south, east, or west. At the time when the Mamaia were in power, they destroyed many of these Taputaputeas in order to bring down the power of the priests.

Case Study My name is Gisele Maeva Takanga Buchin Tehaavi. My husband is Emile Auguste Tehaavi. We are currently serving as missionaries in the Family History Department (May, 2004) in Salt Lake City, Utah. The following is a description of how I have been gathering and working on my family history.

1. The first thing I did was to talk to my mother and ask what information she had. My mother kept her genealogy in a book. It was legal size, like the archive binders. She would read to me out of it, but would not let me borrow it to copy it down in writing. She wanted me to memorize it. There were 7 of these books. My mother gave them to some missionaries to bring to Church Headquarters to have them input for the IGI and Ancestral file. They were supposed to have been taken here. I have not seen them since. But, the information for my ancestors is in the IGI, so I am assuming the information got there.

2. I copied the information from the IGI and put in on a pedigree chart.

3. I looked on the Internet on Ancestry.com and got a lot of information. One line goes back to 1513. The Internet makes it possible. I copied that information onto the pedigree chart.

4. I remembered the stories my mother told me about my ancestors so I could put them together with other information I got as clues to lead me to more information. I saw that my cousins had submitted the same people for temple work, but with different dates and sometimes different spellings of the names. Some temple work had been done several times. I recorded the temple ordinance dates on my records so they will not be done again in the temple.

5. I’m writing the stories that go along with the names, dates, and places so other people can understand why my ancestors lived where they did, and what the sacrifices were that the ones who were early members of the Church made for their faith. The following story is what I remember of what my mother told me.