The Chock/Zhuo family: royal lineage

by | Feb 3, 2019 | History, The Kings of Chu

In mid-January 2019, I contacted a Chinese genealogist and research specialist named Louise Skyles.  She had been of great assistance to our friend, George Huang, helping him trace his genealogy back hundreds of years, and she was highly recommended by him.

My two objectives were:

  1. Locate our family’s ancestral village so we could travel there and try to find any data that might be in the graveyards, and hopefully find someone there who remembered my father’s family and could share stories with us.
  2. Find out how we can find additional records that predate the 1140 AD commencement of our jia pu.

I shared the jia pu with her, via this website, and asked if she could be of assistance.

Within a few days, she had emailed me with some very exciting information and leads to follow.  She explained the following, which she had been able to find because of the jia pu. She wrote, “Your Chock卓(Chinese Pin Yin is Zhuo) family website [this site, chockchin.org] is great. I have done some research on your family according to the information you have provided. Here are some leads which I have found.”

Village: Guan Tang

 Louise wrote:  “Guan官 Tang塘 Village村 which is the name of your grandfather’s hometown, was named after your second generation ancestor. There are still hundreds of Chock/Zhuo卓 families living there. Among them, a retired teacher named Zhuo Bing-Quan卓炳權 who has recently finished a comprehensive Chock/Zhuo jia pu.”
Map:
Click here for Google map 
“Here is some historical info about the village, the English maybe translated by Google, but you get the general idea.
“There may be the Zhuo cemetery somewhere in the town,” she wrote.  “But it could have been destroyed during Chinese Culture Revolution.  However, there is a Zhuo family temple in Guan Tang Village. Here is the picture:”
“If you blow up the picture, you will see the phone number on the door, about the number it states in Chinese, ” If you are searching for Zhuo family history, the telephone is shown below.”
“I just randomly googled trying to find a picture to show you, and this Guantang Village Zhuo family temple was shown in the website talking about some beautiful villages in Zhu Hai City. As I looked closely, I saw the phone number. This could be just a starting miracle,” she wrote.
She later investigated further and discovered that this picture was a snapshot taken by a tourist passing through the village and uploaded to a public site.  It had been taken just a few hours before Louise went looking for a picture of the village for me. This is actually the Zhuo family temple belonging to my clan. Zhuo Bing Quan had written that information in chalk on the door just before the tourist took the picture. Louise found another picture of the same temple taken by a different person earlier in the week, and the door has no writing on it.
It was as if Zhuo Bing Quan had written that message just for us to find — precisely when we would go looking for it.

Our royal lineage

Louise wrote:  All the documents including Chock/Zhuo family jia pu and history books have mentioned that the surname Chock/Zhuo卓 came from the name of a prince of Chu and he was the common ancestor of Chock/Zhuo–(Chu  楚,  was a hegemonic, Zhou dynasty era state. From King Wu of Chu in the early 8th century BCE), There were 27 kings, and Gong Zi Zhuo 公子卓was son of the 20th king, King Wei of Chu (楚威王) (Xiong Shang 熊商).  Learn more about the state of Chu here.

According to tradition, our first Chu ancestor, Xiong Yi , descended from the Yellow Emperor.

“This royal family has a pedigree chart recorded in a history book.  There are about 100 names that were documented. Someone tried to put the data into familysearch.org at one point, but failed to finish them, so they ended up with a few names, some names missing data, and half of them not being keyed in.  Example “

Louise is currently working to create an accurate record in familysearch.org that contains all of the historical data from the Chu records she has at her disposal.  She is using a variety of records, including some that have recently been discovered through archaeological research in China.

She wrote:  “A couple of people have made the effort to enter the data for the Chu royal lineage but failed to submit them. They entered the wrong names, mixing up the relationships, missing the dates, places  or without PIN YIN.  Maybe they could not quite figure out how to make the names submittable. So they just left them as they are. I have started working from the first Chu ancestor and slowly going down to his descendants. Because early Chu history was not so clearly written, therefore I needed to read more documents and compare them and make a more reasonable estimate for their birth dates.  If you just follow the Chu family tree in familysearch, you will see some of them still missing some pieces of info.  There are about 80 names there.”
“As far as I can tell you, it is rare to see the early Chinese royal families not already being submitted multiple times. And for some reason, Chu descendants before you attempted to save them and failed to do so without putting more effort, and just walked away.”
“One more thing to tell you, I found out the wife of the first Chu ancestor was descended from a king of the Shang dynasty. And Confucius was descended from this royal line. So you are actually related to the greatest teacher of China.  I will concentrate on finishing Chu royal line first. If later you are interested in Confucius’ family, you can let me know.”   [I have asked her to fill in the missing parts of the Shang ancestors when she has completed the other research.]

 Closing the gap

Once she has entered all available data for the Chu pedigrees, Louise will work to connect from the end of the Chu history to the start of our jia pu.  The Chu history ends when they lost the struggle to head a unified China to the Qin.

She wrote,”I have carefully read through your jia pu. I have a feeling your record was extracted from a bigger record. It is not uncommon when someone moves far away from his hometown to carry a simplified jia pu with him. In case, he could not return to his home, his descendants will have a piece of family history to remember.”

She will try to contact the retired teacher who has created the comprehensive jia pu.  That may be his phone number written on the door of our ancestral temple.

She also has found “a piece of information that may link your tree to the other book, but this needs further confirmation.”

She added, “By the way, I found a 卓 lady, who was born in Guan Tang Village, had helped Sun Yat-sen fight against the corrupt Qin Dynasty. Because Sun gathered his revolution people in Hawaii, I wonder your ancestor was involved in that. Just a thought.”

Meet your royal ancestors

To see the Chu family tree that Louise is assembling for us, it’s probably best to start at the top, with the first ancestor of this pedigree.  Then you can explore the descendants, and learn a little bit about them, thanks to information Louise is entering in the Life Sketch area.

The first ancestor is:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LJTD-5RL

羋鬻熊
Lord MI YU XIONG
Born about 1231 BC.

季連的後裔Yuxiong (Chinese: 鬻熊; pinyin: Yùxióng, reigned 11th century BC), also known as Yuzi or Master Yu (Chinese: 鬻子; pinyin: Yùzǐ), was an early ruler of the ancient Chinese state that was later known as Chu.[1][2] [3] In the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips his name is written as Xuexiong (Chinese: 穴熊; pinyin: Xuéxióng).[1][2]

Yuxiong’s clan name was Mi (芈). His son and successor Xiong Li adopted the second character of his name – Xiong – as the royal lineage name of Chu, which is now the 72nd most common surname in China.

Ancestry
According to legends recorded in the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, Yuxiong descended from the mythical Yellow Emperor and his grandson and successor Zhuanxu. Zhuanxu’s great-grandson Wuhui was put in charge of fire by Emperor Ku and given the title Zhurong. Wuhui’s son Luzhong (陸終) had six sons, all born by Caesarian section. The youngest son Jilian adopted the ancestral surname Mi and had a son named Fuju (附沮). Xuexiong was Fuju’s son.[3] However, Sima Qian mistakenly believed Xuexiong and Yuxiong were two different people and that Yuxiong was Xuexiong’s descendant.[1][2]

Enfeoffment
Yuxiong died during the reign of King Wen of Zhou, and was succeeded by his son Xiong Li. After Zhou overthrew the Shang Dynasty, King Wen’s grandson King Cheng of Zhou awarded Yuxiong’s great-grandson Xiong Yi the hereditary title of zĭ (子, roughly “viscount”) and the fiefdom of Chu, which in the ensuing centuries developed into one of the most powerful kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn period.

Resources being used in the research

Louise is conducting her research using the following resources:

5. Some recently discovered in the tombs of the Chu royalties

Pronouncing these names

Louise is providing Pin Yin versions of all of the names in her entries in familysearch.org.  This will help all of us who do not know how to read Chinese characters.

If you would like to hear how the names should be pronounced, my brother Galen suggested we use Google Translate.  You can paste in the Pin Yin, or the Chinese characters, and click to translate to English.  If you click the little audio button, you can hear how the name should be pronounced.

Louise explained that within the ancestral family groups, you will find different surnames.  “By the way, if you wonder why the early Chu ancestors had different surnames, it is because they had a Clan surname and a lineage surname. Only the kings could pass on Xiong熊(in Chinese it means bear) as surname.  The rest of them could only use Mi羋 as their surname.

Xiong — which means “bear”