Descendants of Chinese immigrants, mainly from the southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, can be found all over the world. To trace these ancestors, Chinese genealogical website House of Chinn advises family history researchers to fulfill two goals:
- find the proper Chinese names of ancestors
- locate their original villages in China
Chinese Ancestry and Chinese Names
Finding the proper Chinese name of an ancestor can be difficult. Chinese ancestors may appear in genealogical records under several different names. Some of these names were the result of coming to a country that did not understand Chinese languages, and some were the result of Chinese naming practices.
Chinese Naming Practices: Clan Names, Generation Names and More
Traditionally, a Chinese name would be made up of three parts. Take someone named Liu Zhou Yi. The clan name, akin to a Western surname, would come first -- Liu. A clan name can be pronounced differently in Mandarin, Cantonese or any specific dialect. Some clan names with similar pronunciations are written differently as well.
A generation name, if used, comes after the clan name, in this case, Zhou. Although not always used, a generation name applies to siblings and cousins of a particular generation in a family. Clans may have a generation poem, which lists all the generation names in the clan. “The presence and use of generation names can therefore help unravel the hierarchy of the generations within a family clan,” advises the House of Chinn. The given name for this person would be Yi.
Chinese Genealogy Research: More Types of Chinese Names
A researcher may come across more types of Chinese names during genealogical research, including:
- Milk Name – this “infant name” or nickname is used only by family.
- School Name
- Marriage Name – Once married, women would be known by their maiden surnames followed by the word Shee, Shih or See. “For example, Wong Shee,” writes the Vancouver Public Library, “meaning ‘a married woman who came from the Wong clan’."
- Paper Names – Chinese immigrants moving between countries occasionally used identifying documents from other people in an effort to evade discriminatory laws.
Genealogy Obstacles: English Misinterpretation of Chinese Names
Like other ethnicities, Chinese immigrants frequently had their names anglicized by immigration officials. The different traditions regarding name order (surname followed by given name vs. the other way around) also confused matters.
The appearance of the word Ah in Chinese North American names is one example of Western misunderstanding. “Ah” is not a name but a form of addressing someone by adding the prefix “ah” to his or her first name. If an ancestor’s surname appears in genealogical records as “Ahling”, for example, it means that the first name of the ancestor was “Ling”. The actual surname of the ancestor in this case would probably be lost.
Chinese Characters and Ancestors
Due to differences in pronunciation in Chinese languages and cultural misunderstandings, knowing the Chinese characters that make up ancestors’ names is essential in Chinese genealogy. On their website, House of Chinn even demonstrates how a generation name can be uncovered by carefully examining the character that makes up a given name.
“At one stage or another in your search you will be faced with the task of having to deal with the Chinese script,” House of Chinn warns. Translation services may be important at this point when pursuing genealogical research of Chinese ancestors.
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