Paradise has a price: Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and wildfires are not only risks to our lives but also to the cherished objects we own.

This truth swept the islands with all its finality in Lahaina one year ago.

These threats underscore the value of taking steps to preserve important things. One good piece of news recently emerged when it was reported that, remarkably, about a 10th of the documents held by the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, a historic preservation group, had survived the fire, electronically at least.

Thanks to fortunate happenstance, and through the combined efforts of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Hawaii Tourism Authority, thousands of documents that had been housed at the foundation’s office have been scanned, digitized and are now being made available to the public.

The need to preserve precious things is high on my own mind now. My vivacious and outgoing mother, Melinda Hoppe Young, died recently. A mother of four and grandmother of eight, she had become a complete invalid. She finally slipped away on May 25 after three years of wonderful care at Leahi Hospital. That left me, her only family member still living in Hawaii, in charge of handling the possessions she left behind. After years of bad health, Mother didn’t leave much, except for some old family papers and a jumbled collection of photographs.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation’s collection of documents and antique objects, on the other hand, numbered in the tens of thousands on Aug. 7, 2023, the day before the fire torched almost all of it. Nearly 90% of its collection was destroyed in the blaze.

But early this month, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs announced that a substantial part of Lahaina Restoration Foundation’s remaining records are being posted and made available to the public on its Papakilo database website, an increasingly comprehensive central repository of documents related to Hawaii. This will include 298 historic pictures of Lahaina from 1900 to 1992, correspondence to and from Maui’s influential Baldwin family and housing records of Lahaina’s Pioneer Mill, which employed thousands of immigrant workers over its 130 years of existence.

Papakilo will be providing a window into Lahaina’s past at a time the town’s future remains in question.

Lahaina Restoration Foundation was founded in 1962 as Maui’s sugarcane industry succumbed to foreign imports, and civic leaders began to look to tourism for economic survival. Community residents rallied to defend and preserve Lahaina’s historic core from what they feared would be an onslaught of new development. Capitalizing on the burgeoning historic preservation movement nationwide, they succeeded in preserving many of Lahaina’s iconic buildings, transforming the town into a favorite tourist destination for millions of people.

Over the years, the daily pressures of greeting hordes of tourists and visitors while managing 14 historic sites and six museums in Lahaina left the Restoration Foundation’s leaders with very little time for organizing and cataloging the mountain of historic relics and archival materials that had passed into their hands.

In February 2020, Kale Hannahs, Papakilo’s database systems administrator and the driving force behind the expansion of the information clearinghouse, contacted the foundation and asked officials there to begin contributing their information electronically on the Papakilo site so more people could access the unique documents directly. Hannahs had reached out to the foundation as part of a statewide campaign he was spearheading to gather information held in dispersed and far-flung archival locations on different islands.

For more than 16 years, Hannahs has been building and expanding the Papakilo site, which started as a one-stop shop to share things like environmental assessment reports and has grown to include documents from 19 participating organizations. It is probably most famous for housing an ever-expanding Hawaiian language newspaper collection that is believed to be one of the largest collections of Indigenous newspapers in the United States.

Gathering this information is “not just a passion, but also a kuleana,” Hannahs said recently.

Theo Morrison and Kimberly Flook, the Lahaina Restoration Foundation’s directors, were immediately interested in getting involved but were intimidated by how much would need to be done with their limited staff. They weren’t even exactly sure how to go about the task of digitizing so much information.

“We didn’t have the equipment in the early days or the money wasn’t available,” Morrison recalled.

They had had one important early foray on this front in producing what is called the Windley collection, named for one of the group’s earliest and most passionate supporters. In the 1960s, Larry Windley, a charismatic daredevil in Lahaina who had suffered a spinal cord injury while diving and had become disabled, had turned his energies into traveling the state to gather historic information about Maui’s history, creating an extensive chronological record of events on the island.

In 1969, Windley was lost at sea on a sailboat. Barbara Sharp, a foundation volunteer, was inspired to begin laboriously typing Windley’s notes into a computer database. It took four years. It was a monumental project for its day. In 1997, the foundation began making the information available to researchers who were studying Maui history, according to news reports.

But moving those efforts into the modern era, in the context of the entire collection, was a daunting prospect. They would need to learn how to scan documents, organize them electronically and make them digitally searchable.

The next month, soon after Hannahs’ visit, Covid struck. The pandemic induced a government shutdown. Museum visitors and their tourist dollars disappeared.

That created a crisis for the foundation, which faced the prospect of laying off its staff. But government funding came through in the form of the Payroll Protection Program, which allowed it to keep some staff.

Morrison and Flook used the opportunity to modernize their archival methods. Staff members who normally guided tours instead studied up on best practices in maintaining archival collections. They began pulling boxes out of closets, attics and basements, cataloging what they found and scanning the documents.

“It was the silver lining of Covid,” Flook said.

As it turned out, these precise records proved invaluable to the foundation in documenting the value of its holdings for insurance claims following the fire.

More help appeared as the pandemic wore on. In June 2021, the Hawaii Tourism Authority rolled out its Malama Hawaii campaign, which rewarded tourists for participating in volunteer activities while they were visiting the islands.

The Lahaina Restoration Foundation created a hands-on history program to take advantage of this opportunity. Groups of tourists began showing up at the foundation’s museums four times a week to help with the work. Local residents pitched in, too. In all, more than 300 people assisted with the project, Flook recalled. Some people particularly liked scanning old documents.

By the end of the month, Hannahs expects that about 1,500 photos and documents about Lahaina will be posted on the Papakilo website.

That will allow people from Lahaina, including those who have lost everything and those who loved the memory of Lahaina, to search out and discover things that many people thought had disappeared forever.

OHA Board Chair Carmen “Hulu” Lindsey called the Lahaina project a “timely example of the importance of digitizing historic documents.”

Researching this column has affected me as well. I’ve begun scanning all my mother’s photographs. It’s allowing me to relive the family of my childhood and see how many of our happiest memories happened when people were wearing bathing suits, smiling and playing by the water.

We live with risks but also co-exist with so much natural beauty here in Hawaii. Saving those old pictures is reminding me of that.