Original Paternal Genealogy

This and the next 116 pages are photocopies of the original genealogy kept at our paternal ancestral house in Vietnam.  The photocopy was procured through the ardent efforts of my paternal Uncle Son. 

The original genealogy's compilation began in 1816, and it was written in Nôm script, an ancient form of Vietnamese written language described by the The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation as:

Chữ Nôm, is the ancient "ideographic vernacular script" of the Vietnamese language. After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, chữ Nôm, an ideographic script that represents Vietnamese speech, became the national script. For the next 1000 years—from the 10th century and into the 20th—much of Vietnamese literature, philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nôm script. During the 14 years of the Tây-Sơn emperors (1788-1802), all administrative documents were written in Chữ Nôm. In other words, approximately 1,000 years of Vietnamese cultural history is recorded in this unique system.

This heritage is now nearly lost. With the 17th century advent of quốc ngữ -- the modern roman-style script—Nôm literacy gradually died out. The French colonial government decreed against its use. Today, less than 100 scholars world-wide can read Nôm. Much of Việt Nam's vast, written history is, in effect, inaccessible to the 80 million speakers of the language. The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation has joined with scholars in Việt Nam and around the world to save this cultural heritage.

With unmitigated diligence, Uncle Son also serendipitously found one of those rare Nôm scholars to paraphrase the essential part of this genealogy to modern Vietnamese script.  The result of such abridgement and paraphrasing is an 18-page document in modern Vietnamese script.  The condensed, modern Vietnamese version's smaller scope is due mainly to its omission of the original genealogy's inclusions of family recipes, ailment remedies, anecdotes, burial locations, etc.

The image below shows the original genealogy's cover with the 2 characters "Gia Phả" meaning genealogy.