A Spatial-Temporal Exploration of Genealogy Books: The Taiwanese Genealogy Catalogue Collected by The Genealogical Society of Utah
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Chyou, Shu-Min
Abstract
This research explores the spatial and temporal patterns as revealed in the Taiwan genealogical catalogue. Genealogy books can be seen as a kind of local historical documents. It is a Chinese tradition to keep genealogy books so that family members and key events in the family can be recorded. From Han majority to other ethnic minority groups, from royal families to normal citizens, many people can find their family records through genealogy books. When Han migrated from mainland China to Taiwan more than three hundred years ago, they developed the land of Taiwan. Genealogy books that they kept allow researchers to understand the clusters of families, their migration patterns as well as the evolution of different regions in Taiwan. In a large scale, one can observe how the society evolves. In a small scale, one can get a glimpse into an individual’s life path. In addition, genealogy books store abundant demographic information, allowing us to understand the marital status, gender distribution, birth rate, death rate, life span and other information of residents in different areas. In recent years, there is a rising interest to collect and analyze local historical documents such as genealogy books from public, private, academic and civil organizations in China, Taiwan, the United States and Canada. The aim is not only to establish database gleaned from genealogy books, but also to manage metadata so as to facilitate further research. Against this background, since 1975, The Genealogical Society of Utah starts to survey and collect genealogy books in Taiwan and further compiles a Taiwan genealogical catalogue. This study analyzes the draft manuscript of the catalogue collected by The Genealogical Society of Utah. Information such as ethnicity, ancestry, years of publishing genealogy books, administration regions where genealogy books are located, and different styles of creating genealogy books (e.g., hand-written, printed) are stored in Excel file. Statistical Program for Social Science (SPSS) is used to generate frequency and contingency tables, while FactoMineR package in R is used to run correspondence analysis (CA) to further explore the temporal and spatial patterns. Correspondence analysis shows that, except for the relationship between the years of publishing genealogy books and ethnicity which is not statistically significant, there is statistically significant association (p < 0.05) between variables of 1) surname and style, 2) surname and publication year, 3) surname and region where a particular genealogy book is located, 4) surname and ethnicity, 5) style and publication year, 6) region where a particular genealogy book is located and style, 7) style and ethnicity, 8) region where a particular genealogy book is located and publication year, and lastly 9) region where a particular genealogy book is located and ethnicity. Since the results of correspondence analysis indicate highly significant association among those attributes, it is worthwhile to explore and analyze the genealogical dataset more thoroughly and extensively in future research. Keywords： Genealogy Books, Local Historical Documents, Correspondence Analysis, Temporal-spatial data, Genealogical Society of Utah
Subjects
Genealogy Books
Local Historical Documents
Correspondence Analysis
Temporal-spatial data
Genealogical Society of Utah
Type
thesis
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