An unlikely connection between Hawaii and the nation of Kazakhstan has been uncovered and will be explained by Paul Dahlquist on today and Tuesday.
Former Lyman Museum Executive Director Paul Dahlquist is returning to the museum for a lecture on the unexpected shared history of Kazakhstan and Hawaii.
After getting contacted by an English scholar in 1993, Dahlquist learned that his great-great grandfather was an English explorer of the largely unknown Siberian Steppes and what is now modern-day Kazakhstan.
After living and exploring this area of Siberia, Thomas Atkinson and his wife, Lucy Atkinson, had a son in 1848 in a tiny Russian military outpost, which is now called Qapal, Kazakhstan. Alatau Atkinson was named after the Djungar Alatau Mountains.
Alatau, Dahlquist’s great-grandfather, and his family moved back to England where he received an education until his move to Hawaii in 1868.
Thomas Nettleship Staley, an English bishop in Hawaii, offered Alatau a position as a teacher and principal at St. Alban’s College, which is now ‘Iolani School in Honolulu. Atkinson immigrated to Hawaii, where he spent the rest of his life.
He eventually became the inspector general of schools serving under King David Kalakaua and Queen Lili‘uokalani. After Hawaii was annexed as a U.S. territory in 1898, Atkinson became the superintendent of public instruction under Gov. Sanford B. Dole.
“For some reason, I had never heard this family history behind the name Atkinson from my mother and this connection we have with Kazakhstan. This scholar really started me off on this,” Dahlquist said. “I opened a box I had never looked through from my mother and found hundreds of letters to and from Thomas Atkinson while he was in Kazakhstan.”
Along with the letters were five notebooks that were journal entries from Atkinson, which Dahlquist ended up giving to the scholar to read and decipher.
The letters were donated to the Royal Geographical Society in London, where there is an archive about Thomas Atkinson and his explorations.
In 2016, Dahlquist and other descendants of Atkinson traveled to Kazakhstan to unveil a monument to his ancestors in the small town of Qapal.
“We were hosted by the government of Kazakhstan, and they took us around the country for 10 days, where we had feasts, tours and this ceremony,” Dahlquist said. “There was also a book written about the Atkinsons by journalist Nick Fielding that was presented for the first time. The book has since been translated to Kazak and Russian.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, Dahlquist dug deeper into his family history and wrote a memoir of his own. With all this knowledge, he also submitted this idea for a lecture to Lyman Museum Executive Director Barbara Moir, who was supportive of the decision.
“I am excited to give this lecture and have had a great deal of fun putting this together,” Dahlquist said. “I think it’s an interesting part of history that most people are unaware of, and I think many people will be surprised to hear about these connections.”
Dahlquist, a cultural anthropologist, was a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University from 1968 to 1988 until he moved back to his home state and began working at the Lyman Museum. He served as the museum’s executive director from 1996 to 2001.
Dahlquist will be presenting his lecture for the first time from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. tonight and from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Lyman Museum.
Email Kelsey Walling at kwalling@hawaiitribune-herald.com
