Deciphering Genealogy

Art's aunt asked him if he could ask my mom for help in translating her family genealogy.  Mom said she'd be glad to help.  She's one of the very few people we know who can read the old Japanese characters.

When I saw the 11x17 inch sheet of paper with a web of scrawls and lines, I was stymied.

"How can you write what I translate?" Mom asked.  "This is actually a big job.  A lot of the kanji (Chinese/Japanese characters) are badly written and indecipherable.  How can you fit everything on such a small paper?"

It was a  quandary.  I thought of breaking it up into quadrants but thought it would be too confusing for Art's aunt to read.

I finally decided to enlarge it on a huge, thick, brown kraft paper I had.  Then I scanned the genealogy, enlarged the Japanese words and pasted it on the  kraft paper.

Once I got it set up, I asked Mom to start translating.  I wrote what she read onto little green and yellow post-it type paper.

Dates were also difficult because Japanese years change by death of Emperor or a bad luck calamity happening. 

Hence in 1865 it was changed to Keio.  In 1868 it changed to Meiji.  1912 was Taisho; 1926 Showa and since 1989 it's been Heisei.

Keio 2 would be 1867.  Taisho 10 would be 1922.  Heisei 26 is 2014!

Thank goodness for Internet.

The last step was to print out the post-it note English translation and paste it next to the Japanese family names.

The funny thing about working on this was the magic of suddenly making sense of all the lines and squiggles.

We saw that one relative in the 1800's when divorce must have been frowned on had three husbands!  Mom was shocked.  Then we understood why that must have happened.  She was from a family that unfortunately had only girls.  Her first husband wasn't able to give her an heir so she had to get a divorce and took another husband.  It was probably her duty to do so.  She and her second husband also were not successful so they adopted a boy which apparently didn't work out so that led to another divorce.  The third time was the charm and she was able to give birth to three children.  The first (happy days!) was a boy! 

We could see when Art's aunt's relatives moved to America and became citizens.  Another relative had a 1st born son and then produced 6 daughters.  Another relative's last name was winter, and they named their child Haru which means spring.  Suddenly all the lines and squiggles on the paper meant real people with lives full of happy, sad, exciting, striving, loving times.

At first the work of putting this genealogy together seemed like such a daunting task, when I've got too much to do, but having worked on and completed it, it leaves Mom and me with such a wonderful, exhilarating feeling.

We can't wait to bring it to Art's aunt's house tomorrow.  There are so many stories to tell her.