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I had a heartwarming experience on my recent trip to Korea. Met an old friend who I had never met before!
Well, he seemed like an old friend because he knew of my work and had worked in the office of the Korean Traders Association, the precursor to today's Korea Foundation. He was a junior officer there and had the duty of going over applications for grants and he remembered mine. It was 1977.
Forty-one years ago I was a Ph.D. student working on my dissertation in Korea. I had just completed my coursework at Harvard and was in Korea on a Fulbright doctoral dissertation research grant. I applied for a research grant to hire an assistant to help me make an index to a set of "registers" ― the Kyehu-deungnok and the Pyeol kyehu-deungnok ― that recorded applications for adoptions. The registers were kept by the Ministry of Rites, one of the six cabinet-level ministries of the 1392-1910 Joseon government.
Ham Young-jun remembered my application for the grant and worked on the administrative side of things as the application was vetted and approved and moneys were disbursed. He remembered enough details about the application that he linked it to me as I made a presentation to the Gwanghwamun Cultural Forum, a "forum" of which there are quite a number in Seoul, I am finding out.
He remembered my application, and I remembered applying and getting the grant, and thus, though we had never met, it was like meeting an old friend!
Which brings me to the point of this article today, another in the series of the "frog outside the well" view of things Korean ― the Registry of Adoptions was another of the many documents I found that showed the "Confucianization" of Korea in the late 17th, early 18th centuries.
The entries in the Register were highly formulaic, quoting the law, and stating matter-of-factly the outline of the case being approved by the ministry, and thus granting legal status to the adoption. These adoptions were all from within the patrilineage, or, another way to look at it, from within the jokbo, the published genealogical books. The law, the Gyeongguk Daejeon, stated that if a married couple did not have an heir, they could, with permission of all involved, take the son of a brother, cousin or distant cousin, to be the heir in the household.
This showed, first, the beginnings of patrilineality, or in Korean, the bugye system. One did not have to adopt from within the jokbo, patrilineage. And there are records from the early Joseon period that show the adoption of the mother's relatives, and even non-relatives. But as time went by and the patrilineal descent group became important, people came to adopt only on the father's side.
The thing that is interesting about the Register of Adoptions is that within the document itself, it shows the transition. The formulaic expression in the register is: "So-and-so is without heir by wife or concubine, and therefore is applying to take so-and-so, his [brother, cousin, distant cousin]'s first [or second, or third, etc.] son, so-and-so, to be his heir. Both sides of the family represented by family heads, so-and-so, and so-and-so, have submitted documents agreeing to this adoption, and thus it is so issued."
The key point is the two "sides" of the family. The representatives mentioned by name in the early days of the register, the early and middle of the 17th century, were two different names ― implying the two sides of the family were representing the husband's side and the wife's side ― thus two different surnames.
Later on in the document, the late 17th century, the two names are names with the same surname. Now the "both sides of the family" comes to mean the biological father's family and the adoptive father's side of the family. This would show up more when the two fathers, the adopting father and the biological father, were distantly related, thus they were represented by two different heads of the family, heads of sublineages that were separate entities.
And there came to be times when "both sides of the family" would be represented by the same person, because the family head of that section of the extended family represented both fathers ― say a grandfather representing an adoption between brothers.
No longer was a different name introduced. No longer was the wife's side of the family part of the consideration. Evidence again of the lessening of the role of the women, in this case the wife in the household that is making an adoption. Confucianization. Late 17th century.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
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