When Family Myths and Research Collide
Surprise! Not everything you think you know about your relatives is true
This morning I received an email that torpedoed one of my family’s central myths. My father and his siblings always told the rest of us that their grandfather was “the Viceroy of Canton.” Naturally, our extended family took that as gospel — even if we could never identify the specific viceroy whose dates in Guangzhou (Canton) lined up with my grandfather’s birth date there in 1876. Since my grandfather was just a boy when his father died, we had little first-hand information to go on, but I finally deduced that “our” viceroy had to be Liu Changyou, whose name resembled my grandfather’s, Liu Chengyu, and who had been Viceroy of Canton in the early 1870s.
Today, though, I received the first bit of research from My China Roots, the genealogical service I recently hired to look into my family’s Chinese history. Our supposed viceroy was the first casualty of this project:
It turns out that Liu Changyou 劉長佑 on the doc you shared with us was not your great grandfather.
Liu Chengyu’s father was called Liu Zhaolin 劉兆霖 whose literary name 號 was Yuchen 雨臣. His ancestral place was Jiangxia, Hubei Province 湖北江夏(Google map).
He was a 拔貢(“ a student plucked up and offered…
