Help translating words on the edge/back of photo

[Doug 周]

Help please.

The photographs are of my paternal GM’s(grandmother’s) parents. It is harder for me to use the Chinese language tools I have advocated because of penmanship, font size (and laziness). Can someone help me digitize the words? I want to especially copy and paste these captions as text into my genealogy site.

1)Back of both photos


2)GGF left of photo


3)GGF right of photo


4)GGM left of photo


5)GGM right of photo


If I need to re-image the text, let me know.
Thank you everyone for your help.

Doug

[liuyao]

(For your record/confirmation, I also include the Chinese)

1) 給培哥 To Brother Pei

2) 卒於 庚辰年八月廿七日子時（公元一九四〇年） 享壽八十七歲 Died on Year Gengchen (AD 1940) eighth month, 27th day, Hour Zi (midnight), at the age of 87 sui.

3) 生於 甲寅年二月廿七日申時(公元一八五四年) Born on Year Jiayin (AD 1854) second month, 27th day, Hour Shen (3-5pm)

4) 卒於 壬寅年十一月十日戌時(公元一九六二年十二月六日) 享壽八十九歲 Died on Year Renyin eleventh month, 10th day （Dec 6, 1962）, Hour Xu (7-9pm), at the age of 89 sui.

3) 生於 甲戌年十二月廿日巳時(公元一八七四年) Born on Year Jiaxu (AD 1874) twelfth month, 20th day, Hour Si (9-11am)

[Doug 周]

liuyao,

Thank you. The Chinese and Gregorian conversion is perfect.

Doug

[Doug 周]

Help please with another photo. From a picture of my paternal grandfather and his sons.

[liuyao]

北贊弟惠存 To brother Beizan (惠存 is a refined way to say "please keep")

[Doug 周]

Three times a charm

Thank you again liuyao.

If I can bother someone to translate and digitize this last passage from my paternal Zupu? This time I used Pleco and COCR2 to digitize most of the Chinese characters. The characters in red are characters I have could not confirm that I digitize correctly. I also need a translation because the internet translation does not make sense.

Formatted from left to right and horizontal.
孑二 官 粤 官 至 提
刑 後 人 思 慕 建 番
院 於 春 風 橋 北 院
內有 嗣 踮 以 祀 之
辔 院 故 址 屢 遷 備
考 以 舄 古 蹟

The characters of the passage in question are lightly circled in maroon



The whole page of the progenitor zupu for reference



BTW: COCR2 ^click works well in Windows 8.1. However, Pleco ^click digitized most of the characters and COCR2 was not able to additionally digitize the characters which Pleco failed. So for us Chinese illiterates, Pleco is the program to use if you have only 1-3 characters to digitize. If you have a whole page, then it is worth the effort to convert the image to a Windows bitmap format (.bmp not .jpg) and digitize a bunch of characters (albeit you have to select each characters one-at-a-time). Sorry but no COCR2 for Mac OS.

Once the characters are digitized, I tried to translate the phrase into something I could recognize. I am starting to use Yabla Chinese dictionary ^click for translation of phrases and longer text because it gave me better explanations. Unfortunately, for this passage, it did not make any sense.

I still prefer MDGB ^click for 1-3 individual character translation because website will give me traditional and simplified variations, including pronunciation in Cantonese and Mandarin with pinyin and Yale/Jyupting romanizations.

Thanks in advance.

[lachinatown]

子 二 官 粤 官 至 提
刑 後 人 思 慕 建 書
院 於 春 風 橋 北 院
內 有 祠 踮 以 祀 之
書 院 故 址 屢 遷 備
考 以 爲 古 蹟

踮 -- not correct, will try to get the right one

[liuyao]

lachinatown is correct. I thought that 踮 should simply be 焉.


To save you the trouble, here's my translation:

Two sons. Served in Guangdong, up to the post of 提刑 （something like a police sheriff?). To commemorate him, his descendants built a 書院 (like a college, for preparing for the civil service examinations) to the north of 春風橋 (bridge of spring wind). Inside [the school] there was a 祠 to pay him homage/sacrifice. The school has moved several times, to be investigated, to make it a historical site.

The last sentence is a little unclear. By the way, if you like to know more about different official titles, Charles Hucker's book "A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China" is the authoritative reference. The same title may mean totally different things in different dynasties, so the ordinary dictionary might not work for you.

[liuyao]

The first google result gives Hucker's book, completely digitized! 提刑 is entry 6446 on page 495. Too long I won't copy here.

[lachinatown]

The character 焉 maybe correct, but the left portion looks like a 天.

[Doug 周]

OMG! TMI

This is all overwhelming. Thank you liuyao and lachinatown . I need to digest all this information. Google machine translation failed me again.

Hucker’s book ^click is digitized and searchable. This aids the Chinese language illiterate like me. When I <select><copy><paste> the Chinese characters 提刑 into the search box, the program found this amongst the 8k entries.

6445 /，í-ksíng 提刑
SUNG: variant or abbreviation of t'i-tien hsing-yŭ kung-shih
(Judicial Commissioner). SP: intendant judiciaire. P52.

The Civil Service examination is very important to Chinese culture. Like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ^click and stereotypes of Chinese family emphasizing the importance of schooling, education was long ago ingrained into the Chinese culture. The best description (IMO) is Professor DK Jordan Brief Outline of 19th-Century Chinese Civil Service Examinations ^click

BTW: consider purchasing a pdf editor. There is the very expensive Adobe Acrobat (not the free reader) and many more reasonable 3rd party clones (~U$20-30 I use PDF-Viewer ^click).

This way, when you have precious family documents, you can add your notes, bookmarks, and highlight your scanned pages converted to pdf. The notes you type are also searchable. I generally digitize the analog characters in my zupu and paste them as Chinese text into my scanned document. I can then search my personal family documents for a person’s given name. You do not ruin the original with your notes.

See this repost of an image of my zupu where I added notes:

The whole page of the progenitor zupu for reference


Most online Chinese documents are merely analog images (stored to pdf) and therefore not text searchable. Hucker’s book is digital text and searchable.