Finding my Chock cousins
The year 2022 has turned out to be a tremendous year of connecting with Chock cousins. I originally created this site specifically for the purpose of finding my cousins. I thought that perhaps the children or grandchildren of my father's siblings might someday Google for their grandfather, Chock Chin, or the Chock family of Hanalei, or some other keyword that would find this site and lead them here where they would find my contact info and, well, contact me. Unfortunately, there were a few attempts that got caught in my spam filter. (I have heard that Bob Chinn tried at [...]
Finding my Great-grandmother’s Family
by Susan Chock Salgy Finding ancestral records in China is a complex endeavor. Sometimes it comes together neatly and you are done in a month. Other times it takes patience, persistence, prayer, and a miracle or two. Finding my great-grandmother's ancestors took three years, heroic effort from a Zhuhai Museum curator, and some unexpected miracles. It's not over yet. The Year of the Women MARCH 2021 -- Two years after we began working together, Louise and I made a decision that shifted the focus of our research dramatically. This was to be the most important pivot in our entire 5+ [...]
Chock Grand Ancestral Temple in Guan Tang honors Chock emigrants to Hawaii
Guan Tang Chock and She Clan Grand Ancestral Temples The Chinese are a temple people. In addition to the multiple small ancestral temples scattered throughout the neighborhoods of Chinese villages, the oldest clans typically built larger temples called Grand Ancestral Temples, to honor the first ancestor of their clan who moved to the village. This person was forever honored as the founder of that branch of the clan. Typically a new jiapu is created with this founder listed as the first ancestor in the record. It will also document their parents and birth information in order to tie [...]
Finding Chock Chin’s house and Lotus Pond
I have been to Hanalei several times and have looked around for anything that might once have been the famous lotus pond or lily pond. However, I had no real chance, because I didn't actually know any of the relatives who once lived there and knew exactly where it was. That all changed this year. In August 2022, I got an email from Susan Chun, who introduced herself as one of my long-lost cousins. She had found this website by Googling for how to write the ideogram for Chock. She was surprised to find the site and so much information [...]
Chock/Zhuo Clan of Guan Tang – Clan History
Louise Skyles has been gathering genealogical records and working directly with Zhuo Bing Quan for almost four years now and it is amazing how much more we know about our ancestors at this point. Because of the royal lineage from which the Chock/Zhuo clan descends, the records have been carefully kept and well preserved. Despite the efforts to destroy them in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, heroic efforts by Zhuo Bing Quan and others reconstructed them and have rebuilt them to the point where we now have a nearly uninterrupted record spanning 105 generations from my generation, commencing with [...]
The Curious Discovery of Gu Lue Shen and the Gu Jiapu
In March of 2021, we expanded the scope of our research to include searching for the families of the women who married into the Chock clan. This is very difficult to do, because the information about females recorded in clan records is usually very brief (surname only, like Miss Chock). No parent's names or birthplaces are typically noted for the wives when they are added to the records of the Chock men. Despite the challenges, Louise agreed to start looking for any females in the Chock records who did have information listed about their father sufficient to go find the [...]