Book Review: The Porcelain Thief

I enjoyed reading The Porcelain Thief by Huan Hsu.  Huan recounts his genealogical escapade in China, though he did not realize that he was researching his family's history until he neared the end of his journey.

Huan was born in the United States and is of Chinese heritage.  He knows little about his family's history.  He becomes fascinated with the family story of burying porcelain in the backyard before fleeing for their lives.  Huan decides to track down this old homestead and the porcelain.

Uncovering his family's history in China is extremely difficult.  He is fortunate to have living family members in China, one of whom employs Huan at his company, providing him with legal permission to stay in China.   Huan must learn the Chinese language and learn how to navigate the political and social customs of this culture so foreign to him.

As researchers of our family's history, we can identify with Huan when he tracks down elderly family members and tries to extract relevant information from them.  He learns that photographs and records were destroyed; people, places, and memories lost over the years; graves vandalized, moved, or reburied under new construction.

Huan's family's struggles reflect the struggles of China as a whole.  The family was torn apart by war, invasions, political movements, and major cultural shifts- in every generation.  His family's history is mostly oral, and as Huan discovers, will remain so without the availability of records.

While interviewing his grandmother's aged sister, Huan realizes:

"She wasn't making up her memories, but they had unmoored from their original context and drifted into a mosaic with no beginning, end, or order.  It wasn't all that different from my own uncertain understanding of how the fragments of our family history fit together, or what was real and what was imagined, and with fewer and fewer people to ask for the truth."

The homestead where the porcelain was supposedly buried was "forfeited" by the family when they fled.  Huan and his family likely have little legal recourse to reclaim the property, and digging for the buried porcelain is prohibited as it could indicate that the family may have a claim against the current corporate industrial owners.  The entire neighborhood was razed, as was most of their family's discoverable family history.

Some family pictures survived.

One of my favorite quotes from the book,
referring to China's attempt to "catch up"
with technology and industry by copying.
United States patent and copyright laws mean little.
If someone could re-do this with more artistic flair,
that would be great.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.  If you have an online presence and interest in reviewing books, give this program a try.

DNA.land Initial Results

A new website, DNA.LAND, launched to advance DNA studies.  You can upload your raw autosomal DNA file from one of the three major genetic genealogy testing sites (23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and AncestryDNA).  At this introductory stage, your file will be processed to reveal ancestry composition and fifty relatives who share some identical DNA with you.

You can only upload one file per email address, so those of us who manage multiple kits will either not upload everyone or acquire several more email addresses.

According to the website, "DNA Land is a place where you can learn more about your genome while enabling scientists to make new genetic discoveries for the benefit of humanity."

A week ago, I uploaded three raw DNA files:  my parents and me.  At the time, the upload count on the home page was about 3,700 files.  Today, the count is over 6,000.

The ancestry results for my father and me were processed by the next day.  My mother's results are still in limbo.

My father's ancestry seems consistent with results from 23andMe and GedMatch.  About one quarter of his tree immigrated from German areas in the mid 1800s.  The rest is Colonial American with English and Dutch origins.

One relative turns up for him:  me.  The relationship prediction is correct.  More relatives should appear as more people upload their files.

My ancestry should be an average of my parents.  My mother's results at DNA.land are not available yet for this comparison.  One of the discrepancies is that DNA.land paints me as 6% Ashkenazi, while other programs find about 1/8, or 12%.  My mother is about one quarter Ashkenazi and three quarters Irish.

My relative matches were my father and a distant cousin.  This person should be related through my mother, as my father shows no relatives besides me.  This person's name does not appear in any of our matches at the testing companies, nor at GedMatch.  So she is either anonymous or using a different name, or is not calculated as a match at any other site.

This DNA cousin of unknown relation shares many segments of DNA with me; however, most are quite tiny.  DNA.land characterizes these tiny segments as "ancient."  They are not relevant in a genealogical timeframe but rather indicate shared ancestry from a common population.  The largest segment is deemed "recent" and could place our relationship anywhere from a third cousin to more distant.  We would have to figure it out.

New Jersey State Census 1905

Among the finds from my weekend trip to the Denville Historical Society and Musuem (New Jersey) were blank census pages for the New Jersey State census, year 1905.  I have never physically seen a census page from any year, federal or state.  This page seems too large and awkward to handle well.  Perhaps this is one reason for the illegible handwriting that beleaguers census images.

Below is a picture with my hand so you can have a reference for the enormity of the page.

The 1905 New Jersey State census is indexed at FamilySearch.org.  The actual images are not online anywhere that I know of.