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Expert: Korean “genealogy” before the 20th century is all made up

Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, Eugene Y. P...
Pumonymous
  10/30/25
I've heard this before. They were all indentured illiterate ...
cheese man
  10/30/25


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Date: October 30th, 2025 11:39 PM
Author: Pumonymous

Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, Eugene Y. Park said that many Koreans seem to have a genealogical memory blackout before the twentieth century.[81][82] According to him the vast majority of Koreans do not know their actual genealogical history. Through "inventing tradition" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, families devised a kind of master narrative story that purports to explain a surname-ancestral seat combination's history to the extent where it is next to impossible to look beyond these master narrative stories.[83] He gave an example of what "inventing tradition" was like from his own family's genealogy where a document from 1873 recorded three children in a particular family and a later 1920 document recorded an extra son in that same family.[84] Park said that these master narratives connect the same surname and ancestral seat to a single, common ancestor. This trend became universal in the nineteenth century, but genealogies which were published in the seventeenth century actually admit that they did not know how the different lines of the same surname or ancestral seat are related at all.[85] Only a small percentage of Koreans had surnames and ancestral seats to begin with, and that the rest of the Korean population had adopted these surname and ancestral seat identities within the last two to three hundred years.[86]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans#Genealogy

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791862&forum_id=2]#49389491)



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Date: October 30th, 2025 11:51 PM
Author: cheese man (✅🍑)

I've heard this before. They were all indentured illiterate peasants who later fabricated some family history. And it's why they're all named Park Choi or Lee. Interestingly, it was during the civilizing years of benevolent Japanese rule that much of this "history" was retrofitted.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791862&forum_id=2]#49389497)