Unlocking Inherited Treasures
Aug 7, 2014 4:35:12 GMT -5
Post by kjhong on Aug 7, 2014 4:35:12 GMT -5
I am a fourth generation Chinese-American on both sides of my family, and genealogy has been an on-again off-again hobby for several of my family members.
My Mother’s Work (1986)
In the 1986, my mother worked with her own mother to compile a family tree with all of her 16 siblings and their offspring. She also recorded her paternal ancestors going back to 300 years to CHIN Bon Sim (陳本深) who was born in 1683. This genealogy was limited to a list of names, wives’ surnames, and the birth orders of their children. The sole bit of biographical detailed was that my great-grandfather’s first wife had “committed suicide over chicken incident”. Several of my maternal uncles had family trees of their own.
A Trip to the National Archives (2000)
In 2000, my own journey into my families history started when my father suggested that I go with him to the US National Archives in San Francisco, CA to look up our family’s immigration records.
From 1882 to the mid-1900’s, Federal agencies kept detailed records on the arrivals and departures of Chinese immigrants in order to implement and enforce the Chinese exclusion laws. At the National Archives, we not only found my father’s arrival file and interview transcripts, but also the files of his father and grandfather. Some of these documents dated back to 1888.
However, like many research projects, our initial search ended up with few answers and many questions, like: If our Chinese name is Zeng 曾 (Dong in Toyshanese), how did we get the surname Hong? When did the first Hong arrive? How did my Great Grandfather Hong Yin Ming establish his citizenship?
After talking to many uncles and aunts and digging further into the archives, I was able to uncover more pieces of the Hong family’s history in America. We also found family trees written in Chinese by my grandfather Hong Hock How in 1915 and 1927, and others written by Zeng Lian Huan, my father’s second cousin, in 1998.
From family stories my father remembered, we surmised that these genealogies chronicled the beginning of the Zeng Clan, 72 generations ago during the Zhou dynasty in Jia Xiang county, Shandong, record the family’s migration south to Taishan county, Guangdong, 18 generations ago, and continue my father’s generation. We knew we had something valuable, but these Zupu’s remained inaccessible to us locked behind barriers of language and time.
LESSONS LEARNED: There’s a lot of great information at the National Archives including photos. Interview your elders when you have a chance.
My Interest is Reborn (2005)
By 2005, the birth of my first child prompted a renewed interest in our family history. Brushing off my one year of college-level Chinese, I dug deeper into our Zupu’s and was eventually able to decode names and dates going back 300 years, but what little additional biographical details were available were indecipherable to me. However, with the aid of Wikipedia, I make a connection to our clan founder Zengzi, who was a disciple of Confucius and one of the four sages of Confucianism.
In 2009, I came across Geni.com, where a friend was an early team member, and began the slow process of putting our family tree online. Although I had not transliterated all of my ancestors in our Zupu’s, I did add an entry for Zengzi. And good thing I did, because a few years later, I got a match to a profile for Zengzi created by Liu Yao. I merged these profiles without much thought and forgot about it.
LESSONS LEARNED: Geni.com had a great easy to use interface, but in those early days, I didn't fully realize the collaborative possibilities of the platform.
Two Funerals and a Wedding (2013 and 2014)
In 2013, my father and his first cousin’s wife passed away. Their funerals were occasions for our extended family to reconnect. We spent much of the time figuring out how everyone was related. Then a few months later, with a cousin’s wedding approaching, my Aunt asked me to help her update our family tree for the wedding so everyone would have a better idea of how we were related. This request began a new burst of activity.
Initially, I focused on getting updates for my first and second cousins and their families, but as I completed that work I became interested in finding more information on our ancestors to include. Search for information on the Surname Zeng lead me to the Siyi Genealogy website and forum. At the same time, I connected with LiuYao on Geni.com and created the profiles for the intervening generations between my local family tree and Zengzi. This work was greatly aided by handwriting recognition software native to Mac OS which made looking up Chinese names much faster than looking them up in dictionaries by hand.
Fortunately, LiuYao had already entered half of the intervening generations before branching to the family of famous (or infamous) Ching Dynasty official Zeng Guofan. Dr. Philip TAN Chee Lin (philiptancl) had also entered the profiles for all of Zengzi’s ancestors going back to Huang Di. In one fell swoop, my family was connected to the Geni World Family Tree and to the Primogenitor of the Han Chinese ethnic group.
While I was working furiously to complete the Zeng part of the my family tree, my mother brushed of her files which included wedding and birth announcements for the past 40 or 50 years and low and behold a photocopy of the Chin family Zupu. We were also able to connect with two of my first cousin’s children who had been separated from the family by divorce by searching for them using birth date and name searches online. This connection alone made all of the previous hard work worthwhile.
I then contacted Dr. Tan about the beautiful scroll he had created for yuminnan which traced an Indonesian branch of the Zeng family back to Huang Di. This scroll also included wonderful textual descriptions of various ancestors including Emperors Yu the Great and Shao Kang; the youngest son of the Emperor Shao Kang who became the first ruler of the State of Zeng; Zeng Wu the exiled Prince of Zeng who fled to the State of Lu where Confucius would be born; and of course Zengzi. (See thread: siyigenealogy.proboards.com/thread/1845/zeng-tjan-chang-tsang-tseng)
I also mentioned to Dr. Tan that I was a cousin of his on my mother’s side since Chin and Tan are different pronunciations for the same Chinese character. That was enough to set both of us on a search for how my branch of the family was connected the the larger Chin/Tan family tree that Dr. Tan had been working on. With my mother’s Zupu in hand, I was able to confirm my families link to Chen Fengtai who first established the Chin family in Guang Dong in the waning days of the Song Dynasty. Chen Fengtai was already linked through many illustrious ancestors to Huang Di as well. Within weeks, thanks to the great support and previous work of Liu Yao and Dr. Tan I was able to produce a full paternal pedigree for both my mother and father.
Coincidentally, Dr. Tan also found a completely digitized version of my mother’s Zupu on www.chens.org.cn/ that was more recent that our copy.
LESSONS LEARNED: Online tools and communities for doing Chinese Genealogical have vastly improved. The collaborative power of Geni.com is incredible especially for connecting to common ancestors, but this power comes at the expense of giving up control over profiles claimed by living family members. The members of the Siyi forum are incredible generous and helpful. I'm currently playing around with Webtrees which was recommended by Doug 周, but Geni is still my main tool for now. I've also scanned most of my documents and uploaded them to Geni to share them with family members and to guard against the loss of the originals. The data subscription from Geni's parent company MyHeritage.com was worthwhile, but I didn't find much use for Geni Pro. Nothing beats reconnecting with long lost family members.
Here are the pedigree scrolls for the two sides of my family. The Chin family scroll connects to the three scrolls that Dr. Tan created that go from Huang Di to Chen Hu Gong (the first Chen), Chen Shi (founder for the Ying Chuan 潁川 branch of the family), and Chen Feng Tai.
Huang Di to Zeng Zhan Qiu's Descendants in the US
Scroll 4: From Chen Feng Tai to Chin Sui Fan's descendants in US
Scroll 3: From Chen Shi to Chen Fengtai
Scroll 2: From Chen Hu Gong to Chen Shi
Scroll 1: From Huang Di to Chen Hu Gong
These scrolls unlock a broad sweep of my family’s history, and mark a major milestone in my research. Going forward I will likely take a break, then start to:
My hope is that these amazing family records will be shared for generations to come and be accessible to anyone who can read English or Chinese.
My Mother’s Work (1986)
In the 1986, my mother worked with her own mother to compile a family tree with all of her 16 siblings and their offspring. She also recorded her paternal ancestors going back to 300 years to CHIN Bon Sim (陳本深) who was born in 1683. This genealogy was limited to a list of names, wives’ surnames, and the birth orders of their children. The sole bit of biographical detailed was that my great-grandfather’s first wife had “committed suicide over chicken incident”. Several of my maternal uncles had family trees of their own.
A Trip to the National Archives (2000)
In 2000, my own journey into my families history started when my father suggested that I go with him to the US National Archives in San Francisco, CA to look up our family’s immigration records.
From 1882 to the mid-1900’s, Federal agencies kept detailed records on the arrivals and departures of Chinese immigrants in order to implement and enforce the Chinese exclusion laws. At the National Archives, we not only found my father’s arrival file and interview transcripts, but also the files of his father and grandfather. Some of these documents dated back to 1888.
However, like many research projects, our initial search ended up with few answers and many questions, like: If our Chinese name is Zeng 曾 (Dong in Toyshanese), how did we get the surname Hong? When did the first Hong arrive? How did my Great Grandfather Hong Yin Ming establish his citizenship?
After talking to many uncles and aunts and digging further into the archives, I was able to uncover more pieces of the Hong family’s history in America. We also found family trees written in Chinese by my grandfather Hong Hock How in 1915 and 1927, and others written by Zeng Lian Huan, my father’s second cousin, in 1998.
From family stories my father remembered, we surmised that these genealogies chronicled the beginning of the Zeng Clan, 72 generations ago during the Zhou dynasty in Jia Xiang county, Shandong, record the family’s migration south to Taishan county, Guangdong, 18 generations ago, and continue my father’s generation. We knew we had something valuable, but these Zupu’s remained inaccessible to us locked behind barriers of language and time.
LESSONS LEARNED: There’s a lot of great information at the National Archives including photos. Interview your elders when you have a chance.
My Interest is Reborn (2005)
By 2005, the birth of my first child prompted a renewed interest in our family history. Brushing off my one year of college-level Chinese, I dug deeper into our Zupu’s and was eventually able to decode names and dates going back 300 years, but what little additional biographical details were available were indecipherable to me. However, with the aid of Wikipedia, I make a connection to our clan founder Zengzi, who was a disciple of Confucius and one of the four sages of Confucianism.
In 2009, I came across Geni.com, where a friend was an early team member, and began the slow process of putting our family tree online. Although I had not transliterated all of my ancestors in our Zupu’s, I did add an entry for Zengzi. And good thing I did, because a few years later, I got a match to a profile for Zengzi created by Liu Yao. I merged these profiles without much thought and forgot about it.
LESSONS LEARNED: Geni.com had a great easy to use interface, but in those early days, I didn't fully realize the collaborative possibilities of the platform.
Two Funerals and a Wedding (2013 and 2014)
In 2013, my father and his first cousin’s wife passed away. Their funerals were occasions for our extended family to reconnect. We spent much of the time figuring out how everyone was related. Then a few months later, with a cousin’s wedding approaching, my Aunt asked me to help her update our family tree for the wedding so everyone would have a better idea of how we were related. This request began a new burst of activity.
Initially, I focused on getting updates for my first and second cousins and their families, but as I completed that work I became interested in finding more information on our ancestors to include. Search for information on the Surname Zeng lead me to the Siyi Genealogy website and forum. At the same time, I connected with LiuYao on Geni.com and created the profiles for the intervening generations between my local family tree and Zengzi. This work was greatly aided by handwriting recognition software native to Mac OS which made looking up Chinese names much faster than looking them up in dictionaries by hand.
Fortunately, LiuYao had already entered half of the intervening generations before branching to the family of famous (or infamous) Ching Dynasty official Zeng Guofan. Dr. Philip TAN Chee Lin (philiptancl) had also entered the profiles for all of Zengzi’s ancestors going back to Huang Di. In one fell swoop, my family was connected to the Geni World Family Tree and to the Primogenitor of the Han Chinese ethnic group.
While I was working furiously to complete the Zeng part of the my family tree, my mother brushed of her files which included wedding and birth announcements for the past 40 or 50 years and low and behold a photocopy of the Chin family Zupu. We were also able to connect with two of my first cousin’s children who had been separated from the family by divorce by searching for them using birth date and name searches online. This connection alone made all of the previous hard work worthwhile.
I then contacted Dr. Tan about the beautiful scroll he had created for yuminnan which traced an Indonesian branch of the Zeng family back to Huang Di. This scroll also included wonderful textual descriptions of various ancestors including Emperors Yu the Great and Shao Kang; the youngest son of the Emperor Shao Kang who became the first ruler of the State of Zeng; Zeng Wu the exiled Prince of Zeng who fled to the State of Lu where Confucius would be born; and of course Zengzi. (See thread: siyigenealogy.proboards.com/thread/1845/zeng-tjan-chang-tsang-tseng)
I also mentioned to Dr. Tan that I was a cousin of his on my mother’s side since Chin and Tan are different pronunciations for the same Chinese character. That was enough to set both of us on a search for how my branch of the family was connected the the larger Chin/Tan family tree that Dr. Tan had been working on. With my mother’s Zupu in hand, I was able to confirm my families link to Chen Fengtai who first established the Chin family in Guang Dong in the waning days of the Song Dynasty. Chen Fengtai was already linked through many illustrious ancestors to Huang Di as well. Within weeks, thanks to the great support and previous work of Liu Yao and Dr. Tan I was able to produce a full paternal pedigree for both my mother and father.
Coincidentally, Dr. Tan also found a completely digitized version of my mother’s Zupu on www.chens.org.cn/ that was more recent that our copy.
LESSONS LEARNED: Online tools and communities for doing Chinese Genealogical have vastly improved. The collaborative power of Geni.com is incredible especially for connecting to common ancestors, but this power comes at the expense of giving up control over profiles claimed by living family members. The members of the Siyi forum are incredible generous and helpful. I'm currently playing around with Webtrees which was recommended by Doug 周, but Geni is still my main tool for now. I've also scanned most of my documents and uploaded them to Geni to share them with family members and to guard against the loss of the originals. The data subscription from Geni's parent company MyHeritage.com was worthwhile, but I didn't find much use for Geni Pro. Nothing beats reconnecting with long lost family members.
Here are the pedigree scrolls for the two sides of my family. The Chin family scroll connects to the three scrolls that Dr. Tan created that go from Huang Di to Chen Hu Gong (the first Chen), Chen Shi (founder for the Ying Chuan 潁川 branch of the family), and Chen Feng Tai.
Huang Di to Zeng Zhan Qiu's Descendants in the US
Scroll 4: From Chen Feng Tai to Chin Sui Fan's descendants in US
Scroll 3: From Chen Shi to Chen Fengtai
Scroll 2: From Chen Hu Gong to Chen Shi
Scroll 1: From Huang Di to Chen Hu Gong
These scrolls unlock a broad sweep of my family’s history, and mark a major milestone in my research. Going forward I will likely take a break, then start to:
- Identify and map the locations of our ancestral villages and succeeding generations settled in different places.
- Translate the text found in the Zupu’s including the lengthy prologues and epilogues, dates of birth and death, and the additional text that accompanies some of the entries.
- Compile the genealogies of my wife’s family starting with her uncles, aunts and cousins then seeing how far back as we can go from there.
- Contact our family associations in San Francisco to share this work
My hope is that these amazing family records will be shared for generations to come and be accessible to anyone who can read English or Chinese.
