How to get zupu

[peacefuldove]

Now that i know where my grandfather and grandmother ancentral villages are, what can i do to know whether there is a zupu for their villagea, and if so, how can i get my hands on them?

grandfather (Lee) - wah lam, tung tau heung, kung yick heung
grandmother (Ng) - shek kiu wan, tung tau heung, kung yick heung

[twoupman]

This is a difficult question to answer. First, you should try at your local Lee association, they may have something. The next best thing is to visit your gf's village, and if you still have distant relatives then ask them to help. During the Cultural Revolution a lot documents were destroyed, however, you never know.

[peacefuldove]

there is a local kwangtung association in my hometown (Teluk Intan, Perak, Malaysia). My father said that there is no family information there, but i will try to ask again.....

Visit to gf's village - i wont dare to do it on my own.....but will keep it in the back of my mind..i hope to do it one day.

is there no other way?

[twoupman]

A Guangdong Association is too large an entity to have individual surname records. There is only one other way, do you know of any other people of your gf's generation and who came from the same village or heung who went to Malaysia with him?

What is your fear of visiting your ancestral village? Transportation is excellent and if you don't speak the language you should find somebody who does and is willing to accompany you. However, there is still no guarantee you will find a record but how else will you know without giving it a try. You may be surprised. At least you will see the place where your gf came from and perhaps learn something from such a visit.

[twoupman]

There is a post showing Lee Associations worldwide on this forum, and the one in Malaysia is at: www.legacy1.net/lee_associations.html#malay where you will find the address for the one in Penang as Lee Sih Chong Soo, 182-A Burmah Road. Visit them and see if they can help you with your zupu.

[peacefuldove]

thank you very much....will try this lead.

fear - basically of the unknown. i need more preparation when i make that trip. do people actually hire guides to do this?

[raymond]

peacefuldove,

Check out the following website to familiarize yourself with what to expect when visiting your ancestral village(s) in Guangdong Province: gocn.southcn.com/english/ It is the official website of the office of Overseas Chinese Affairs of Guangdong that can help facilitate your visit. In particular, click on the section entitled "Root Searching Program" for some personal testimonies of some Overseas Chinese who have recently visited their ancestral villages. Perhaps this will ease your anxiety about making your next trip to your ancestral village(s).

Raymond

[twoupman]

peaceful dove,

Sorry, thought you are in Penang. In Perak there are two Lee Associations, one in Taiping (Perak North, Taiping 0:25A Chinese Club Road) and the other is in Ipoh (5A Jalan Toh Puan Chah). Hope this helps.

[peacefuldove]

thanks......you seem to know where all sources of information resides? (how?)
Why is there only a certain family name in a village? are they all mostly related? i guess all the women have to move out to the husband's village when they get married.... ?Usually, how big is a village? Is it like 3 rows of houses or maybe 10 heads of family or are we speaking like 100s? Is there a standard number of heads of family fto form a village, and if it gets larger, it becomes a district or etc....? These questions are not relevant, just curious..

[peacefuldove]

my grandfather is still living, and per records, he is about 105 years old. his memory is not good anymore (if only i have started this search way earlier), anyway he could still remember some of the villages name that i printed off here from the village-search and that is exciting. however, i realised now that my grandmother village is not correct, because when i showed it to him, he said that is a "loh lee"'s village.....not his wife's village......I guess i have to find a Îé village for her. he cant name it anymore.......

[raymond]

peacefuldove,

I can certainly understand your apprehension about visiting your ancestral village in rural China. Fear of the unknown makes for a very uncomforting venture. I just wanted to share my experience and view on ancestral villages in rural Guangdong Province. I have made 6 trips to China, 5 of which were to my ancestral village and/or the nearest town to the village.......and the last 3 trips were solo trips.......and being born in the US, I am not fluent by any means in my local Chinese dialect. I certainly cannot read nor write Chinese. So, even under these against-all-odds circumstances, I still made solo trips to rural China. The experience was very rewarding indeed. Even in my broken local Chinese dialect, I encountered no real difficulty in my travels. I went with an open-mind attitude and common sense precautions. I found people in rural China to be generally friendly and with a sense of curiosity. As were often rumored in the US by others, I encountered no beggars in rural China. Today people are not starving as they were in the olden days of famine and poverty, so there is no need to beg for money and food nor to ask for special favors. What I found to be most remarkable and welcoming is the fact that all the people in my ancestral village speak the local dialect that my parents used to speak to me when I was growing up as a child, and some of the Chinese words and phrases I had once heard were gradually being recalled from my long-suppressed memory. FYI, my paternal ancestral village is Cheong Sah located near the market town of Gujing in Sun Wui District (Xinhui in Mandarin). Sun Wui is one of the 4 districts collectively known as Sze Yup (siyi in Mandarin).

As for the origin of the concept of a dominant surname of the village itself, my take on it is the village was formed largely out of self-defense in the olden days, and also out of comfort with living among your own family surname clan. For various reasons, many Han Chinese migrated from North and Central China into rural Guangdong Province hundreds of years ago. Once in Guangdong, there were fierce clan rivalries and frequent invasions by bandits upon the villagers. Thus, to protect themselves, villagers would form walled-in enclaves of the same family clan name for self-defense and comfort. Some villages, especially those located in Hoiping District, erected many huge fortress-like towers called "dailou's" to guard against bandits and rival clans, and later used to guard against Japanese invaders in the 1930's and 1940's. As with any evolutionary process, some villages were small with only a few hundred residents while others grew to be quite large with several thousand residents. Some in the village would be close bloodline relatives with only a few generations apart while most would be so far removed in lineage that they would not be considered close relatives any longer in spite of their same surname. As you may already know, there was and still is a double standard in Chinese culture which favors the male lineage. Females were and still are rendered the secondary gender because they will leave the natal family household when they marry and become part of her husband's household family clan. As such, females were deemed a liability to the natal family clan, and the males were deemed to be assets to carry on the family clan name. The revered village "jook po" (zupu in Mandarin), if you can get your hands on it, should delineate all the family lines nicely and orderly for the village. Of course, the "jook po" will be written in Chinese, so you'd need it to be translated into English.

I hope this shared experience helps to answer some of your questions and help alleviate some of your anxiety about making a trip to your ancestral village. In fact, don't pressure yourself to think that you must procure all the genealogical information in one trip. For example, payng your respect to the ancestral gravesites can be reserved for another trip. You are relatively close to China such that you can, and may want to, make follow-on trips to your ancestral village, especially if you have discovered long-lost relatives still there. I think you will find any follow-on trips to be most rewarding and more comforting when you have specific tasks in mind to perform on those trips.

Bon voyage!
Raymond

[peacefuldove]

Raymond,
Thank you very much for sharing the experience. It is insightful.

In your trips to China ancestral village, do you have to engage a local person in Tai shan to help you (logistics-eg setting up meetings, permits or access to papers, etc) or did you just drop into the country and venture around on your own (probably in the latter trips, maybe?)? The tai shan website mentioned about contacting them if one needs help in doing genealogical work. Did you use them? Did your relatives know you were coming?

I have heard that we can engage an agent to do the search and he will prepare a thick genealogy book for a fee. Do you have any idea how much would that cost?

[raymond]

peacefuldove,

I accompanied my father on my 1st and 3rd trips to rural China, so these trips paved the way for me to make the 4th, 5th and 6th trips to my ancestral village on my own. I still have first cousins near the village, so once I'm in the area, I feel much more at home with them serving as my host. Of course, I would phone them ahead of time prior to my trips. I had no need to solicit the services of the Overseas Chinese Affairs office, nor the local services of anyone else. I have no personal knowledge of services or costs for genealogical assistance. However, you can log onto the Root Searching Program of the Overseas Chinese Affairs website at: gocn.southcn.com/english/rootsearching/ and view testimonies of various people who seemed to have procured satisfactory genealogical services.......or perhaps some posters on this siyi website may be able to share their experience on the genealogical services and costs of the Overseas Chinese Affairs office.

Raymond

[peacefuldove]

thank you for the perspective. given me an encouragement to get my father interested in genealogical work and to go with me to do the search.