Chinese Grandfather - need help with name please

[jeanieallergy]

Hello all.
I'm so pleased I stumbled on this board and hope I will be able to get some help to progress my family history. I have no knowledge of the Chinese language, and no contact with any Chinese family.
I live in England and had a Chinese grandfather who came here from Hong Kong in 1910. He died years before I was born and very little is known about him.

In England he was known as Ahlom Lowing (sometimes anglicised to Alan Lowing).
On his marriage to my grandmother he named his father as Ah Sam, Master Tailor, Deceased.

I have a document written by him in the 1930s in which he states:

He was born in 1885 in 57 Kowloon Tong Village, near Yamatti in Hong Kong.
His mother's name was Tsang Koon Tse.

If anyone can start me off by helping me with correct names for my grandfather and his father, that would be wonderful. Many thanks.

[helen]

Hong Kong was a busy place - many comings and goings via the port - back to China. Is he buried in England? Is there any Chinese chararcters on his headstone?

Take the Ah away from his name - and possibly he last name was Lum - first name Lo Wing.

This website may or may not be of use. myweb.tiscali.co.uk/dustyfiles/index.htm

gwulo.com/

[Doug 周]

jeanieallergy,

Your dilema is very common. I assume the document written in 1930 was in English. If there are Chinese characters, please post an image and someone with traditional Chinese language reading skills might be able to interpret the letter.

A big problem for beginning Chinese family heritage researchers is the reliance on romanization/transliteration of names & places to words pronounced in the 1910 English dialect. Transiliteration of Chinese words in England will be just as inaccurate as transliteration of places like Sheffield or Cheltenham into regional Chinese dialect. These are just methods of local communication. 1910 was the tulmultous change from the Qing dynasty to the Republic of China. There was no official romanization like the current Chinese government's pinyin.

The key is getting the names in Chinese characters. Fortunately, he left Hong Kong while it was a British colony. A ship's manifest might be helpful, since there might be Chinese characters cross referenced to the list of English names. However,you would need to know what particular romanization/tranliteration name he used in Hong Kong to board the ship. You mentioned he took on the name Ahlom while in the UK. As Helen stated, don't fall into the trap of the transliteration of the Guangdong prefix style of 'Ah' for a given name. Finally, Chinese men at the beginning of the last century were comfortable with having many different names.

Based on the information you provided, I would recommend you take a step backwards, and concentrate on gathering your family heritage information of your grandfather's offspring from the time of his arrival to UK. There should be records and recollections of family members in the UK. This will have nothing to do with Chinese specific genealogy, instead being an exercise in basic Western genealogy. Local genealogy societies should be helpful.

Contact these distant Aunts and Uncles, 2nd and 3rd cousins, and see if they have memories, documents, photos, and memoribilia. Be patient, and record your information diligently. One of your goals is to try to discover letters & envelopes, or notations on photos & artifacts, looking for Chinese characters for hints to your ancestor's name and ancestral village.

Consider this Wiki: How to Start Your Chinese Family Heritage Research^click. As Helen stated, find your ancestor's gravestone and see if there are Chinese characters. Use this Wiki: Cemetery Project^click and look at the updated links on the bottom. Please post photos of the inscriptions on gravestones.

Eventually you will assemble this jigsaw of information. It will require detective work on the order of Sherlock Holmes.

There is usually as much information as your level of desire and organization.

IMHO,
Doug

[Henry]

Hi Jeanie,

Welcome to our Forum!

I believe the places that you refer to in Hong Kong are:

Kowloon Tong ( 九龍塘 )

Yau Ma Tei ( 油麻地 )

Since your grandfather was born in Hong Kong - you may want to check the Hong Kong online database for births & deaths:

www.gov.hk/en/residents/immigration/bdmreg/applybdm.htm


Also, you may want to inquire and ask the Hong Kong government what records are available that might be useful:

www.gov.hk

I suggest that you contact the UK government to find out about what records are kept for Chinese born in the British Commonwealth (Hong Kong) that have immigrated to England.

If there are Chinese characters on the gravestone of your grandfather, I suggest taking a digital photo and posting it on the Forum - generally, the gravestones contain the full Chinese name, ancestral village and other information.

Where are the immigration documents for your grandfather ? They will contain useful information.

Henry

[jeanieallergy]

Thank you all for your suggestions. Unfortunately I really don't have much to go on: grandmother was English and so there are no Chinese relatives in this country; the gravestone has no Chinese characters on it and I haven't seen any documents at all with any Chinese characters. My mother and aunt appear to know nothing at all of his origins, other than the fact that he came from Hong Kong. I haven't found any immigration documents and I suspect there may not be any, as he was a British subject when he came to this country so I suppose he didn't need them? He was a ship's steward for a few years before marriage so I expect he came over by working his passage. I will try to get his birth certificate though, that could help. But the link seems to be to an online application for a search of the records, not a database, unfortunately (unless I'm missing something). Thanks, anyway, I'll see about applying for a search.

[helen]

I wonder if there is anything of use here

www.bris.ac.uk/history/customs/ Chinese Maritime Customs project

Dragon flagBuilding on earlier collaborations with historians at Cambridge University and the Second Historical Archives of China, this 2003-07 AHRC-funded project was designed to further understandings of the modern Chinese state, British imperial history, and the history of modern globalization in China, by focusing on the role the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and its staff played in these historical processes. The first step was to produce a new catalogue of the 55,000 files that make up the archives of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service held at the Second Historical Archives at Nanjing.

[frieder1ch]

It seems to be very difficult to find the immigration papers. Can it be that many Chinese in the beginning of the 20th century entered the US illigally? It was so easy to do the German genealogy for my family,but it is extremely difficult for me ,without knowledge of Chinese, to do the genalogy for my wife's family (Lam). I have the feeling to give up.

[helen]

Hi Friederick - It might be best to start another thread - with your query. Then the information aill not get mixed up. There has been a lot of interest in the Chinese who arrived in the US - a lot of them were paper sons. We need to know if you have any Chinese Characters, where in the States the family were, type of business they were in, any associations they might have belonged to, eras you are talking about. The more information we can have, the better for us to be able to help you.


Actually, I just noticed that you have a thread already. Sorry about that - but the above still stands.