In Memoriam: Dr. George William Grace

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Dr. George W. Grace (September 8, 1921 - January 17, 2015). Dr. Grace was a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, where he served on the faculty in the Department of Linguistics from 1964 until 1991. In 1955, while a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, Dr. Grace began work for the Tri-Institutional Pacific Project (TRIPP) — a project of Pacific anthropological research funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and administered by Yale University, the University of Hawaii, and Honolulu's Bernice P. Bishop Museum. His task was to produce a classification of the Austronesian languages of Oceania, with particular attention to the position of Polynesian languages. In 1955, after several months of library research in New York, Dr. Grace departed for Melanesia, and for the next year traveled throughout the region conducting fieldwork. In 2007, Dr. Grace donated his Melanesian field notes, photographs and related papers to Hamilton Library's Pacific Collection -- all are available online via the George Grace Collection. Numerous of his works, both published and unpublished, can also be found throughout Hamilton Library's collections. 

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