Talk:J. R. Kealoha

Needs temporary protection
There is a massive influx of people vandalizing the article, both registered (mostly vandal accounts) and unregistered, so I think it would be useful to give it temporary edit protection. --Ivario (talk) 12:55, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

J. R.
What does "J. R." signify? According to the Hawaiian name article:
 * Surnames did not exist in ancient Hawaii. Early converts might adopt a Christian name and use their Hawaiian name like a surname. In 1860 Kamehameha IV signed the Act to Regulate Names. Hawaiians were to take their father's given name as a surname, and all children born henceforth were to receive a Christian, i.e. English, given name

is "J.R." some title or rank, or initials of Christian English forenames, with "Kealoha" being a surname? If the latter, then what names does "J. R." represent? If the answer is "nobody knows", then the claim that Kealoha is "one of the few Hawaiian soldiers of the Civil War whose real name is known" is only partially true. jnestorius(talk) 23:40, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

What the cited source says is:
 * "Unlike many Hawaiians who fought in the Civil War, we know Kealoha's real name. We know his Hawaiian name because fortuitously on January 22, 1865, he ran into Colonel Samuel Chapman Armstrong," Hawaii Civil War Round Table President Justin Vance said.

So perhaps it's Justin Vance's personal opinion that Kealoha is the man's "real" name and that "John Robert" (or whatever Christian English names he adopted) are not "real". Which is a reasonable viewpoint, but not an uncontroversial one that Wikipedia should endorse. jnestorius(talk) 23:46, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

What? The source is basically stating that the name can be attributed to a real person as cited by burial records of his unmarked grave and the letter by Armstrong corroborating his Hawaiian name Kealoha. Other Native Hawaiian combatant served under non-Hawaiian names like Prince Romerson or John Sandwich for example. I don’t see what the confusion is. KAVEBEAR (talk) 01:55, 6 March 2020 (UTC)


 * We only know his part of his real name. We don't know what "J. R." stands for. We don't know whether "Kealoha" was a surname or given name or both. jnestorius(talk) 14:26, 6 March 2020 (UTC)


 * I believe the initials came from his burial records: a map of the location of his unmarked grave site. KAVEBEAR (talk) 08:24, 12 November 2023 (UTC)