I recently got my hands on my family’s jokbo.

What’s a jokbo? It’s a Korean genealogy book. My culture has its pros and cons like anyone else’s. One of the pros happens to be that they recognized the importance of a written record early on. That means I have detailed documentation on my ancestry going back 500 years, with anecdotal information going back 1,000 years.

So who are these ancestors? Let’s go backwards in time. Everything is in Chinese characters because while they were speaking Korean, the Korean alphabet wasn’t widely adopted until the last century.

Each horizontal box represents one generation. So starting from the bottom left, that’s my grandparents’ generation. Then you work your way up until you eventually get to someone who lived from 1541-1596 in the upper right. Turns out it doesn’t take that many generations to go back 500 years!

That earliest documented ancestor was Lee Deok-Hong, a Confucian scholar who was the youngest disciple of Korea’s most famous philosopher (aka the guy on the Korean 1,000 won note). Lee Deok-Hong served in the royal court and acted as an advisor to the crown prince when Korea was invaded by Japan. He was also magistrate of a district and focused on famine relief. He wrote a bunch of stuff which I imagine still exists in some obscure section of a Korean library. Being a nerd seems to be in the family DNA.

If you look at the pages closely, you may notice something strange. There’s someone who lived from 1630-1653, and his son who lived from 1663-1730. What gives? How do you have children ten years after you die? The clue lies in a small set of characters above the son’s name which reads “adopted heir.” The father died without an heir and a child was brought in (most likely a nephew) to “continue” the family line. This happens a couple times in the lineage, actually. It’s the first sign that not everything is as straightforward as it seems…

In the late 1800s, as the last royal dynasty was collapsing, many people simply bought their way into a genealogy to obtain higher social status. So the whole jokbo thing has to be viewed with some skepticism. The info in my family’s genealogy seems to check out, but you never know for sure.

A bigger issue which you may have picked up on: women are not in the jokbo. Both sons and daughters are noted, but whereas sons are recorded with their own name, daughters are recorded with…their husband’s name. If they didn’t marry, I guess they just vanish into the ether. If you searched the husband’s genealogy, you wouldn’t find the daughters either because wives are not part of the jokbo.

This is understandably maddening to Korean women. My mom says the women have been reduced to shadows, erased from existence. Not to mention this tells a very incomplete story about ancestry, since it’s really only my paternal grandfather’s lineage. I don’t have as much info on the other 75% of my ancestry since I’m not considered part of those families in a patrilineal society.

And you know what’s behind this gender imbalance? Very possibly that Confucianism Lee Deok-Hong was all about. Because Confucianism in Korea, at least as interpreted by later generations, extolls the virtue of subservience, whether children to their parents, subjects to their ruler, or wives to their husbands. It’s hard to distinguish what the scholars believed from what their ideas were used to justify - but either way, this is the legacy of what my most distinguished ancestor helped shape.

The thing about people from the past is they will always fail our standards. Let’s face it, if you go back even just 100 years all of our ancestors were probably racist. There’s a great SNL skit about two reenactors at the NY Tenement Museum leaning a little too hard into their 1913 characters and going on a rant about Italians at the factory.

It’s important to hold these flaws to account, but it shouldn’t be our singular goal. It’s worth trying to see our ancestors in the context of their time. Confucianism is outdated now, but it was a new idea in Korea when Lee Deok-Hong was around. It was seen as a new way of governance to replace the old system, which had grown bloated and corrupt. Unlike us, Lee Deok-Hong didn’t have ideas like democracy and equality to latch onto. In his own way, he might have believed he was changing the world for the better.

Plus, you have to give credit to the ancestors for simply surviving. Take Lee Deok-Hong’s son, whose five younger brothers were executed or imprisoned when they were on the wrong side of a palace power struggle. He endured that and still had enough self-deprecating humor left to give himself the pen name Seonodang, or “the hall of the man out of touch with the world.” Or his son, who lived through not one, not two, but three invasions of his country that must have felt apocalyptic, losing at least one child in the process. And the women who were alongside the men for all of it but whose names we’ll never know.

Or my own paternal grandparents, who were born as colonized subjects of the Japanese Empire, lived through the Korean War, and are somehow still lucid today in their 90s. On top of which, my grandpa made sure to handwrite the generations below him into the jokbo, including the women’s names for the first time.

What’s my takeaway from this genealogy diving? We’re all the recipients of a tremendous will to live, which has been passed down through countless generations and outlasted some really dark parts of history. It fills me with both a sense of resilience and responsibility.

What about you? Have you learned something interesting looking into your ancestry?

Peace and love,

Bryan