Jokbo epiphany
Recently working with two organizations that are analyzing and indexing Chinese and Korean "jokbo," I had an epiphany — actually two epiphanies.
The first is that Chinese "jiapu" and Korean jokbo are very different. They serve different purposes and have very different content. I and everyone else on these two teams assumed from looking at the two styles of documents and seeing the generational lines and the Chinese characters that they are very similar. Their structure is, but in content, they are completely different.
That was the first epiphany.
The second difference was revealed when I looked at how wives are handled in each case. In the Chinese jiapu, women are mentioned only by their surname, with little other information. Often the document lists a home town and sometimes a father, but not enough information to find out more about them.
Most importantly, the Chinese do not have a "bongwan," which is how Koreans keep track of the ancestral home of the founder of the clan. In the Korean jokbo, it is of major importance. It is the key to finding the records of the wife.
Jokbo, like jiapu, are patrilineal documents. That is to say, it is a record of men related to men through men — the classic definition of an agnatic kinship group. However, jokbo always make reference to the wife’s patrilineal group and always gives enough information so that one can find the wife in her own patrilineal jokbo. She is traceable.
In fact, we can say that the whole point of jokbo is to establish credentials and standing in the elite strata of traditional society, and that includes the wife’s family background as well as the husband’s.
Early jokbo from the 15th and 16th century listed sons and daughters and all their offspring equally. It was not a time of male dominance. By the 17th century, influence from China and neo-Confucianism led to a change in jokbo, and it became a male only document, as far as the primary listing was concerned.
However, the wife was always listed, and men could only have one wife. A man could have secondary wives of lesser social status, including commoners and slaves, but he could only have one principal wife. If the first wife died — which happened often with complications in childbirth — then the man could take another wife. We sometimes see a third wife, but they were always in succession, never simultaneous. Secondary wives or concubines were never listed in jokbo. Never!
Principal wives were always recorded in jokbo. The whole point in listing information about the wife is so that one can find her in her natal jokbo. The jokbo lists her bongwan, first and foremost. It always gives her father, and often lists her “sajo” or four ancestors— father, grandfather, great grandfather, and maternal grandfather. Quite often, if the wife were a descendant of a prominent historical figure, it would list that fact as well.
I recently conducted a brief experiment. I took a random page from a jokbo and looked at the number of men and women on the page. There were five men over five generations. Those five men had seven wives. In addition, the page listed the sajo of each wife. That makes 28 relatives of the wives listed on this one page. The five men, their seven wives, and 28 affinal ties means the wife’s lineage outnumbered the men 5 to 35.
Note that of the affinal entries, seven were the maternal grandfathers of the wives. This brings even more surnames into the mix, all to show the respectability and status of the men's and women's families. Through listing the maternal grandfathers, we can find the surname of the wife’s mother. That data can be included in a chart which gives us seven more individuals — now the count is 5 to 42!
Does this mean that jokbo are really documents of women’s genealogy? Yes! That’s exactly what it is.
To look up female ancestors in the West, one must find a census report, a birth certificate, marriage certificate and death certificate. For Korea, it’s all right there in jokbo. While a document of men on the surface, it is a gold mine for research on women.
In this new age, no longer dominated by patriarchy and patrilineal descend groups, women can look up their ancestry inside the documents prepared for men. Jokbo is, in that regard, a document for women.
Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.