by Pastor Ken
Recently, to answer my son’s question about certain relatives, I updated my genogram.
Decades ago, such a diagram was hand-drawn. Nowadays, many computer programs can help. Just enter your name, then the names of your parents, spouse, children, and their respective dates of birth and/or death, and you can easily generate a diagram. Once the names are matched, we can even connect with relatives, and the family tree covering several generations becomes accessible.
A basic genogram will use squares for males and circles for females. In addition, different symbols are used to describe more complex relationships, such as divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, separation, adoption, etc. Some programs include individual health information so that heretic diseases can be traced. Some include financial information to indicate who amassed family wealth or who filed for bankruptcy. Some include migration history to show where the family moved about, which helps to explain the ethnicity and language traits in the family. A comprehensive genogram can help us understand how changes in the family affect our personality, behavior, and values.
In my own family, according to my late father, there is a poem containing ten Chinese characters. Each character/word represents a generation. So, there are ten generations in the record. Each baby boy will receive his given name bearing the character of his generation so that relatives can tell which generation such a person belongs to by simply checking the name. In our ancestral hall, “tablets” list deceased persons by their names based on their respective generations.
Unfortunately, in my father’s generation in the early nineteenth century, because of wars and rapid changes in the world, our clan was broken up and dispersed. The information I have in hand can only be traced back to the previous four generations.
When I was little, usually relatives would visit each other during the Lunar New Year. After the guests left, my mother would explain how they were related to us. Relatives have different degrees of closeness according to the family tree. We were supposed to trust close relatives and help each other out. Since I didn’t bother to remember my ties with all the relatives, I told her, “No matter what, if we have frequent interactions, we are close. If not, we are distant.” My mother didn’t agree and rebuked me for not understanding kinship.
My parents were first-generation immigrants to Hong Kong. So we didn’t have too many close relatives. I moved to the US years ago and also don’t have relatives around me. In the past few decades, rarely we have had large family gatherings. For me, relatives are just like friends. The more interactions we have, the closer we become. After I finished charting out the genogram, I realized I am connected to some people, at least on paper. Although there is no close relative near me, I’m a member of my family. Maybe one day when I compare my family tree with another person’s, we will realize we are related. That will be interesting.
