Looking for 潮楹 ("Chiu Ying") village in Taishan

[luna]

Hi,

I am trying to locate the name of this village, 潮楹里, which should be located in Taishan. All of the family graves I have found so far give this spelling, but I cannot find it on Google Maps or Village DB. The closest possible thing I have found so far is a settlement mentioned on Google Maps, which is located in Taishan and spelled as 潮迎 (Chao Ying).

Some surnames in my tree with 潮楹 on their gravestones include Tsang/Dong (曾) and Leung (梁), if that could be of any help.

[Henry]

Hi Luna,

Please post a clear photo of the gravestone that has the name of your ancestral village - the inscribed characters on the gravestone may differ from the Chinese characters you provided.

Henry

[luna]

Here are the images:

[gckimm]

Hi:

You transcribed those characters correctly. However, I have to say that I am stumped. I can't find a reference to any village by the name of 潮楹 anywhere. It could be that the village has ceased to exist and there are no online records of it. It's also possible that the village name was changed to 潮迎, but I don't find any evidence of that. Another possibility--no offense to your family members--is that they misremembered the characters for the village name. But the second character is not common, so it doesn't seem likely that they would choose this particular character in error. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

Greg

[Henry]

luna,

I am also stumped - cannot find any village by that name.

Do you have any other documentation on that village name ?

Henry

[luna]

I wouldn't be too surprised if they misremembered the characters, though it would be odd due to my family's situation. Each grave was commissioned by estranged family members who haven't been in touch in many decades, yet somehow they wrote the village name the exact same way.

Unfortunately, I don't have any other documentation about the village whatsoever.

All I know that could possibly help is the counties my ancestors were born in. On my paternal line, Sing Chew was born in Kaiping, while his wife Sui Yee was born in Xinhui. My maternal line (which includes Chong Dong) were all born in Taishan, and they all met and married in China before immigrating. Because of this, I would assume the village would located further inland and not by the sea.

[tsin.unfoon]

Have you tried the Facebook group "Chinese Ancestry Research" or "Taishan 台山 Hoisan" for help? There are knowledgeable people there as well.

[jasonwu]

Hi luna,

Your inquiry has stumped even Greg and Henry, some of our most experienced forum members. 潮楹里 Chiu Ying Lay has been especially hard to locate, not only because the village name rings up no results in online mapping services (Google, Baidu, Tianditu), but also because the village isn't associated with any township on the headstones. Normally, village names are provided in county-township-village format, such as this fellow Dong also interred at Ocean View Burial Park (www.findagrave.com/memorial/263562473/sun-mow-dong) - his home village is written as 台山上閣南溟村 Toishan (County), Sheung Kok (Township), Nam Ming Tsuen (Village) - whereas your relatives only have the county and village on their headstones. If we knew the township, that would greatly focus this search to one region in Toishan.

According to the VillageDB (villagedb.friendsofroots.org/search.cgi), most 曾 Dong/Tsang villages are located in southern Toishan, particularly on 上閣 Sheung Kok island where the clan's 2 dozen villages are centered around the largest village of 其樂 Kay Lok (same township mentioned in the paragraph above - maps.app.goo.gl/N6h39jmEJXcBNitf6). I asked a friend who is from across the river - he's never heard of Chiu Ying Lay amongst these villages, but if Chiu Ying is indeed in Sheung Kok, we both suspect Chiu Ying Lay might be the lesser-known alternate name to one of these 2 dozen villages, or a defunct or minor hamlet better associated with a larger nearby village - both reasons would explain why it's not locate-able on maps. However, these are purely based on our speculations. < Edit: see follow-up response below.

I found one more headstone with Chiu Ying Lay at Mountain View Cemetery (www.findagrave.com/memorial/251996540/pong-kong-dong) - this man also uses 立 Lap as the middle character in his name like Chew Sing Dong, perhaps this is a shared generational character?

Below are two ways of finding official records that will contain birthplace information which may clarify the village name in question:

• If your relatives came to Canada before 1952, find their immigration records by searching their legal names via Library and Archives Canada (recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/Home/Search?DataSource=Genealogy|ImmCit|ImmFroChi).
• If your relatives resided in Canada during 1923, find their C.I.44 forms* via Ancestry (www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/62651/). *C.I.44 forms came to be due to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act which required every person of Chinese descent in Canada to register with their local authorities, regardless of if they were non-status or a naturalized citizen or a Canadian-born citizen. It was a huge disgrace which basically made Chinese Canadians second-class citizens, but it's an invaluable database for genealogy research today. It's also said to be the first use of mass photo ID in Canadian history.
  

-Jason

[jasonwu]

Woah - okay, I tried a different approach by expanding the data pool: I went back to Find A Grave and looked at Dong's buried in California - it took a few dozen clicks before finding this couple, Jenny and Kim Dong, buried in San Mateo, CA (www.findagrave.com/memorial/229011538/jenny-dong) - they hail from 台山潮境潮盈里 Toishan (County), Chiu King (Township), Chiu Ying Lay. Notice that the 盈 Ying used is slightly different from how your family write it - it's the same character without 木 "Wood" on the left side.

Here's the location of 潮楹 Chiu Ying (潮迎 Chaoying), located just 340 metres south of 潮境墟 Chiu King (Chaojing) Market (maps.app.goo.gl/yvkrg8L7gM2rKjtr6). I'm sure other members had already found this location prior, but ruled it out due to it being located in the Wong stronghold of Chiu King Township (villagedb.friendsofroots.org/display.cgi/heung/147). However, it seems that Chiu Ying is an anomaly among its neighbours.

Cheers,

Jason

[Henry]

Hi Jason,

I am always impressed with your researching - great to know that your generation will have your skill-set !!!

Henry

[luna]

Jason, thank you so much! Not only for finding the village, but also with finding other (possible) relatives.

Some of my ancestors also had the surname Wong, but since I didn't have any of their gravestones I didn't include them in my original post.

Luna

[gckimm]

Great work, Jason!

Greg

[LJ]

Great job, Jason! I also went to Find a Grave and found the graves of Jenny and Kim Dong. I missed finding Pong ChKong Dong's grave, though. My search included graves with the last names Tsang (曾) and Zeng (曾), 曾 itself, as well as Dong (曾), without cemetery locations specified. Just in case creators of Find a Grave memorials inadvertently entered the last names as first names, I also searched graves with these last names as first names. I didn't find any other graves of people with ancestral homes 潮楹, 潮盈, 潮迎, or even 潮境, but I might've missed them.

I also Googled the terms '"潮盈" "潮境"' and got the following result in the "Chinese Times Newspaper" collection of Simon Fraser University's Library website: An article, entitled "曾松翁千古紀聞" ("Chronicles of Zeng Songweng through the ages"), about a 台山潮境郷潮盈里人 [Taishan Chaojing Xiang (Heung) Chaoyingli person] by the name of 曾松翁 (Zeng Songweng) (https://chinesetimes.lib.sfu.ca/ctimes-134486/page-3). The article's usage of the 盈 character instead of 楹 echoes the name of Jenny and Kim Dong and Pong ChKong Dong's ancestral village, 台山潮境潮盈里.

Incidentally, as can be imagined, the photo search at Find a Grave was tedious and time-consuming, as well as prone to human error, so I wondered about creating a web scraping tool using OCR and AI to automate searches of grave photos at Find a Grave. I then went to one of my relatives, who majored in computer science, knows a little about AI and machine learning, and has experience creating web scrapers, to ask him about creating such a tool for Find a Grave. After quickly Googling about this, he informed me someone had already created a scraper for text at Find a Grave, but not for photos. When I asked him to create the photo scraper, he told me the requirements and difficulties of creating scrapers. One requirement is that a web scraper in general would first need to copy the target website's database to a server with plenty of cheap storage space, before it could search through the database. The corresponding difficulty, for a photo scraper, or more generally, an image scraper, is that the copy of an image database would be vastly larger, and therefore, vastly more expensive, than a copy for text database.

Cheers!
LJ

[luna]

I also decided to do my own grave photo search for anyone else from 潮楹/潮盈, but this time I searched on the City of Vancouver's very own index for Mountain View Cemetery (https://covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/). Here's my notes on who I found--

Bing Dong, aka Louie Fung Dung
曾能炳 (Tsang Nang Bing)
b. 1877, d. 11 Nov 1942, bur. 13 Nov 1942
covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonId=90309

Pong Kong Dong, aka Ping Kong Jang (same man found on Find a Grave)
曾立明 (Tsang Lap Ming)
covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonId=90019

Quon Wing Dong
曾富占 (Tsang Fu Dzim)
b. 25 May 1888, d. 16 Sep 1973 in Vancouver, bur. 21 Sep 1973
Parents unknown, widower of Shee Tam; came to Canada around 1913
covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonId=68464
search-collections.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/Image/Genealogy/6c3890a8-1a06-4374-846f-9d77183455c1

Based on what LJ could find, looks like there were quite a few 曾s from Chiu Ying despite being located in a Wong "stronghold"...

Also, about Pong Kong Dong--based on the coordinates City of Van provides, his grave is located near Bing Dong's. While I could not access their death records on BC Royal Museum, I suspect Pong Kong is Bing's son. That seems to align with what I know about Sing Dong Chew--his father's given name was spelled as "Nam Ging" on his death record. The first syllable in Nam Ging sounds similar to "Nang" (能) in Nang Bing, in addition to Pong Kong and Sing Dong sharing the character 立. I'm wondering if "Nam Ging" was actually pronounced more like "Nang Ging" instead?

Luna

[LJ]

Hi luna,

Thanks for searching the City of Vancouver's index for Mountain View Cemetery. I didn't know about that index before. Thanks for letting me about that index, as well.

On the index's entry for Pong Kong Dong, the grave photo (covapp.vancouver.ca/BurialIndex/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonId=90019) looks very different from the picture at Find a Grave (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/251996540/pong-kong-dong#view-photo=269874071). It also didn't seem to have any legible inscriptions.

Oops, don't forget Jason also did a search.

Your suspicions that,

- Pong Kong Dong was the son of Bing Dong,
- Sing Dong Chew's father's given name Nam Ging was actually pronounced more like "Nang Ging" instead,

sound logical.

For more help on finding the village, did you get a chance to try, as tsin.unfoon suggested, the Facebook group "Chinese Ancestry Research" or "Taishan 台山 Hoisan"?

I should add that since the Chinese characters for the names of a number of people from the village, and variant characters for the village's name, you can search for these names at FamilySearch.org and MyChinaRoots.com.

Cheers!
LJ