The U.S. House has passed by voice vote legislation that would authorize a memorial at Kalaupapa, Molokai, for the more than 8,000 Hansen’s disease patients forcibly sent there between 1866 and 1969.

Hawaii representatives Mazie Hirono and Neil Abercrombie sponsored the bill.

A similar U.S. Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka must pass before the memorial can be built.

The primary objective of the memorial is to display the names of the more than 8,000 people exiled on Molokai’s Kalaupapa peninsula during its century-long history as the compulsory destination for Hawaii’s Hansen’s disease patients.

The memorial would both recognize the patients and help their relatives fill gaps in their families’ genealogy and history.

The patients came to Kalaupapa in two waves. The first 5,000 arrived between the years 1866 and 1896. Most of these lived in Kalawao, on the peninsula’s east side. The rest, approximately 3,000, came between 1896 and 1969 and resided on the west-facing Kalaupapa side. At least 90 percent of the residents were native Hawaiian.

Virtually all the 8,000 were buried there, but only about 1,300 grave markers remain as visible evidence of their having lived and died there.

The Kalaupapa monument was one of the first proposals of Ka Ohana O Kalaupapa, a group of Kalaupapa patients, family members and friends formed about five years ago, but the idea has been circulating much longer than that.

U.S. representative Ed Case first introduced a bill in Congress in 2005 that would require the Department of the Interior to authorize the establishment of the memorial in Kalawao and/or Kalaupapa within the boundaries of the Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

The names are mostly available in Department of Health records.

Anwei Law, international coordinator of IDEA, an advocacy organization for people challenged by Hansen’s disease, and her husband Henry, a former Kalaupapa National Park superintendent, have been recording the names in a computer data base since last August in preparation for the monument. They have been working from old Department of Health ledgers and other records. Anwei Law has studied the people and history of the leprosy settlement for more than 25 years.

The support for the memorial on the part of the nearly 30 remaining Kalaupapa patients is pretty much unanimous. They and family members sent petitions and have testified in writing and in person before Congress urging passage of the bill.

“People at Kalaupapa, like the rest of us, want to be remembered,” Olivia Breitha said in her testimony. “They want the world to know that they were here.”

Breitha, a Kalaupapa resident for 69 years, died in 2006 at age 90 shortly after she wrote that.

Hawaii’s entire congressional delegation backs the measure. Also supporting it is Gov. Linda Lingle, Bishop Larry Silva, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the United Church of Christ and The Friends of Haleakala National Park.