My China Roots' Genealogy Workshop - How to Decipher Jiapu

[helen]

Published on Jun 21, 2017
Courtesy of the Chinese Benevolent Association of Jamaica.

This workshop was conducted on 23rd March, 2017, in Kingston, Jamaica.
Have you ever wondered about your Chinese ancestry? Watch one of our researchers, Clotilde Yap, explain why jiapus 家谱 (family or genealogy books) are the key source that can trace your lineage back several hundred, up to almost 3,000, years. Learn about the history of jiapu, what you can find inside your family jiapu, and how to find it.

To view the whole talk, go to:

Visit www.mychinaroots.com for more info, or for help finding your jiapu today!

For free online guidelines on How to read your Chinese genealogies, visit www.chinesefamilyhistory.org/h...

[kaluosima]

Hi everyone, I have been researching about my roots ,and I found my great grandfather's tomb, which is one of the most incredible things I have ever done. Well, that tomb does not have any information, it just has the names and no more. I also found my jiapu a very old jiapu from many thousands years ago. I have no idea how to start.
Any advice?

[ginagaladriel]

Carlos, long time no hear, hope all is well!

What is the oldest family member name you have? would the jiapu you have be connected to them or to a female member of your family? maybe comparing the eldest person in your family tree you might be able to look for the "youngest" in the jiapu (if it's thousands years ago, somewhere in between you should be able to find the characters?) 

[Doug 周]

kaluosima ,

Congratulations, you have obtained the ‘Holy Grail’ of Chinese genealogy.

I can wax ineloquently about trying to interpret your Jiapu for Chinese illiterates. In order to be more efficient, please share more details about your finding. Do you have the actual document or a digital image? Do you have your lineage Jiapu or the whole clan Zupu?

Can you share how you obtained your Jiapu? Can you upload an image of a few pages. Did you use My China Root’s service?

To attempt an explicit answer to what I think your question is: Locate where you are on the Jiapu. Determine your generation number from the progenitor of your Ancestral Village. Try to have the characters connected to your lineage digitized. You can do this yourself or commission someone to digitized your document. This will help you in the pronunciation of the names in a multitude of dialects, as well as moving between simplified and traditional characters.

Looking forward to your Forum response.

[kaluosima]

Doug,
Thank you for your reply.

The book is not in digital image because I do not have a scanner, well I heard that it is too old to search my great grandfather. I also visited few months ago his tomb and i could not find any information about him. I know tombs contain some information such as place of origin. However, in his tomb i only found his name and her wife name. do you have any idea to trace my great grandfather?.
Although I tried to find a digital Jiapu of my family, I could not find it after many attempts. I found that book through word of mouth near to my place. I also found a poem which is a kind of rule to give names to people who get married. I think that book has a gap between my oldest generation in this case my great grandfather and the last generation included in the book, but not sure as my Chinese is still limited.


Regards,
Kaluosima

[Doug 周]

The 'ole' missing link conundrum! This is a problem many Chinese heritage researchers would love to have. Tell us your journey about contacting the village network to obtain the jiapu. By interviewing village elders and distant relatives in discovering your jiapu, could you find anyone who might be related to your great grandfather (ggf)? Was there anyone taking care of his tomb during Ching Ming? Are there nearby tombs of other possible relatives? Who directed you to the tomb site? I assume that the people who knew about the grave site were relatives. Is anyone related to your ggf that you can do parallel genealogy research. Based on your oral history of possible local relatives, could a parallel lineage connect to persons in the jiapu document? Why did the previous owner of the jiapu share this copy with you (usually only relatives will share to other relatives)? What was his/her possible relationship? Did douglaslam help you? Are you still in Australia (close enough to China) or did you return to the America's. Are you planning another trip? (Sorry for all the questions, but this is how others on the Forum learn to do Chinese genealogy, especially that you did your own personal field work)

Are you able to find your male ancestors generation name(s) in the poem? This might help you discover how many missing links or generations you need to find.

Making a digital copy for your clan would be an admirable goal. My preferred mobile app is CS Scanner which (IMHO) is better than many flat plate scanners. The app's ability to handle curved originals and adjust for parallax is very good www.camscanner.com . Once you have your jiapu as a pdf, you can annotate directly to the digital copy without ruining your analog document. Also, an inexpensive Adobe clone (I use Tracker's PDF-Xchange Viewer ~U$35 for PC www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer ) allows you make notes and insert the digitized names next to the character images

To digitize Chinese characters, my goto app is Pleco www.pleco.com/ . The optional OCR plug-in is U$12 and lets you digitized Chinese image characters to insert into your pdf. I take images directly from a flat panel screen to digitized computer images. You can also write on your mobile screen to digitize characters.

Looking forward to reading more of your story.

[kaluosima]

Hi Gina, so far so good.

Doug,
Well, I found that jiapu by interviewing some elders and relatives. After that my aunty told me that she heard about that book but she was not sure if her father kept it. Then she found it.
I could not go further as my great grandfather's tomb has no information about his father, maybe someone in the forum knows how I can link to that book as I have that gap.
I am still trying to find more information but it is almost three generations back and the oldest person did not remember or never heard about that person.

Thank you for your apps.

[Doug 周]

Very fortunate your Aunt found the jiapu. How is the Aunt connected to you? Is she able to identify where her father, gf or ggf is located on the jiapu or which lineage he is connected. In other words, can you go laterally on your family tree before you ascend upwards to the past? Since older jiapu’s are male oriented, do your other uncles know their lineage?

Sometimes, a certain page is worn or has a lot of marks on the page since on that is the spot the relatives study intently and add their notes and reminders. This is a reason for you to digitally image the pages so as to add your marks and notes electronically and not ruin the jiapu.

For the forum’s information, how did you find you Aunt? You have been with the forum for a long time and the oldtimer(s) (me) are very interested. Are you able to find your extended male’s names on the generational poem?

[ginagaladriel]

Carlos, glad to hear you're ok. Maybe asking if there are other copies of that jiapu that were stored overseas?  
I ask because I was lucky enough that Douglas Lam was able to get me copies of some pages of the town's registry book, it had my great grandfather but only 3 of his 14 children, they were able to get it because a copy of the book was kept overseas.... it's worth trying to find?

Or if you know where you grandfather came from, maybe looking for a book in family search, I know they have several uploaded jiapus (on the link it has several surnames, perhaps try your luck?).

I don't read Chinese (my knowledge is less than beginner) so I was not able to get mine there, but thankfully, as mentioned before, I got some pages thanks to Douglas