In the spring of 2021, after having completed several important milestones in the project of extracting ancestral records from our Zhuo clan jiapus and zupus, I asked Louise to see if she could go back through the records and find information about the fathers and mothers of any of the women who had married into the Zhuo clan. In Chinese genealogy, this is highly unusual.
In Chinese genealogy, the male family members, who carry the family surname, are considered to be the only ones of importance to the clan, and therefore they are the ones who are recorded in detail in the jiapu. The daughters are often simply listed as “Miss Zhuo,” with a birthdate. Daughters are designed to be married off to another clan, and their primary contribution to their own family is to fetch a bride price. Their main mission in life is to earn a high price for her father, and bear sons for her husband who will carry on his clan’s name.
However, I am a Western-style genealogist, even though I am half Chinese, so I am not contented to follow only the Zhuo male line. The grandmothers are important to me, and I wanted to know if we could find information about any of their parents to add to the family tree.
Louise went back through the records and discovered, to her surprise, that there were a few instances where the fathers of the brides were of such prominence that their information was noted in the Zhuo records. This led Louise to a number of Gu families whose daughters had married into the Zhuo clan.
She entered the names into the familysearch.org tree, which added many missing generations to the Gu pedigree. Soon I began receiving messages from different Goo relatives living in Hawaii and China, who had found the newly added records and were curious about how we had obtained the records.
One of these was Gerry Nihipali, who was born a Goo. She and her husband live in Laie, Hawaii, and have been active genealogists for decades. She is something like a 10th cousin of mine — she connects to the Zhuo clan through an ancestor 9 generations beyond herself.
She created a little video a few years ago that explains how their family obtained a lot of their records. I am adding it here. It is fascinating how so many of our families had to protect and smuggle these records out of harm’s way.