Finding our Miss She in the She Clan Jiapu

Chinese jiapus are awesome, but you really need specific details in order to find what you’re looking for in them. And if you work with a large and complex family tree like ours long enough, you might need a little miracle or two from time to time, to find the one elusive piece of information that will make all the difference.

Looking for Chock Chin’s 11th great grandmother

In September 2021, as part of the project to find the ancestors of the women of my family tree, Louise began searching for records of the She clan. A Miss She had married Chock Chin’s 11th great-grandfather in the 1500s. Zhuo Bing Quan’s wife is from the She clan, so she asked him if he had any of the She records. He actually had a complete 11-volume set, and he sent a picture of them to Louise.

Her hope was that the zupu might contain information about the daughters of the clan (which is not always the case). If so, we could look for Chock Chin’s 11th great-grandmother. If not, at least we could find the Zhuo daughters who married men of the She clan.

Zhuo Bing Quan cautioned Louise not to expect too much. He felt it would be hard to find our specific Miss She in the books, because we didn’t know her father’s name. (That’s the crucial detail that unlocks the secret of how you fit into a jiapu.) That detail had not been recorded in the Zhuo jiapu, so we wouldn’t have it to search with in the She jiapu. Louise knew that was true, but felt that she should keep looking for her anyway.

She looked more closely at the picture of the zupu, and realized this was not an original set, but a copy. That made her wonder if there might be a copy somewhere she could find. She did a Google search and found more information, which made her suspect this zupu might actually be part of the FamilySearch collection.  She looked there and found a set of jiapu that looked just like the set in the picture.

You can find the 11 volumes of the She Clan zupu here in the Family History Library catalog.

 Searching for Zhuo Bo Liang in FamilySearch

She began to read the She zupu volumes searching for She clan members who had married members of the Guan Tang Zhuo. In Volume 2, she found a daughter Miss She who married Zhuo Yu Quan卓玉泉 of Guan Tang. The dates seemed right, but my ancestor’s name was Zhuo Bo Liang 卓伯良 — not Zhuo Yu Quan卓玉泉.  She decided to search for Zhuo Yu Quan’s name in FamilySearch. To her astonishment,  Zhuo Bo Liang’s name showed up on the search results.

It turned out that Zhuo Bo Liang was also known as Zhuo Yu Quan — this was one of his three alternate names. Typically people do not enter alternate names when they create these FamilySearch profiles, so it was incredibly lucky that all three names were included on his record.  This enabled the search engine to find him, no matter which of his names you searched with.

The extraordinary thing about this (in a goosebump-raising way) was that Louise herself was the person who entered those alternate names, at the very start of her Zhuo research journey.

In 2019, when she first began working with me, she carefully combed through our initial record — Chock Chin’s abridged jiapu — line by line, to make sure that everything was properly transferred from there to the FamilySearch tree. When she came to Chock Bo Liang, she felt impressed that it might be useful to somebody someday if she entered all his different names, so people could search for him with any of his names.

Looking back on this, Louise is actually surprised that she made that decision, and feels she was guided by the Holy Ghost. That decision would turn out to be vitally important not just theoretically for someone decades later, but for a slightly older version of herself.

She said,  “I did not know 2 1/2  years ago, that what I had done would benefit today’s me. I normally don’t enter everyone’s three or four names, since you only need the primary name to complete the record. But sometimes, if I feel it is important enough for a particular person, I will enter their other names, thinking that others might search for them someday.”

As Louise said, “We are so lucky, because your grandfather’s abridged jiapu had recorded Zhuo Bo Liang’s other names. If we relied solely on Zhuo Bing Quan’s reconstructed, handwritten jiapu, he would only have one name: Zhuo Bo Liang.”

Here’s how Chock Chin’s abridged jiapu shows their names.

And because we knew this alternate name, Zhuo Yu Quan, we could pinpoint our specific Miss She in Volume 2, page 10, of the She zupu.  Which is the documentation of her ancestry that we had been seeking from the start.

Here is Zhuo Yu Quan’s name on page 10 of Volume 2.  On the first line from the right, highlighted in yellow, it says: One daughter married the same villager Zhuo Yu Quan.  According to Louise, that is also a very unusual stroke of luck. She said, “In the early generations of the She clan only a few of the records list the daughters, and even fewer list the daughters’ husbands.” So the fact that Miss She is listed along with her husband is another little miracle to add to the list.

After All the Miracles

Instead of blank spaces where her father and mother and She grandparents should go, Miss She’s pedigree now looks like this:

It makes me happy to know we have connected her to her long, rich heritage, and can learn about the legacy we inherit from the She clan as her descendants.

Learn more about the history of the She Clan before they moved to Guan Tang >