Genealogy Thailand And Private Investigator

[JurgenG]

My relation with my gf is definitively heading south. On the positive side I had the chance to know a "typical" Thai family from the inside. And even if there is no future in our relation, I really want to know more about her family, where they come from, what made what they are now ...

Unfortunately Thailand is not so good with archives and Google can't help much. In the west, if you want to know the origin of your family there are services like genealogy.com. In Thailand, who would you ask ?

But also their recent history, last 20 years, reads like Dallas, the tv series ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_%28TV_series%29 ) . Who could I hire to know more ? I know this family for a couple of years now and before leaving, I really would like to have some answers to questions that bug me. No particular reason, just curious.

[Thongkorn]

I would be surprised if you got any Information about a Thai, from a Thai.Maybe leave well alone and just get on with your life, You would never trace there family tree if they don't want you to know.,Mama takes Care of daughters baby maybe Mamas brothers children too , and so on , Some baby's grow up calling there grand mama mother /mama. So i think you have Job on.Even if you Employ a private investigator, Thai people i know usually keep every thing in plastic bags and over the years the paperwork gets eaten by insects, or the photos dis colour with age, if they are more Upper class then totally forget it.

[noise]

I would suggest that 90%, if not 99%, of the people have a very short trace back to a village (e.g., anyone you meet in Bangkok likely has parents born in some village). And that village knows the complete history of the family. In fact, many people in that village are probably all related to "your" family in some manner. People didn't move around in the not too distant past.

If you can get someone to go with you and spend some time with some old folks in the home village, and old folks love to talk about yester-year, you will learn all you want to know.

[CanadianGirl2]

I'm also interested to see if anyone has had any luck on the genealogy side of things.

I'm more interested in getting birth/death/marriage certificates as well as any immigration documents rather than a verbal history. Doesn't help when people keep changing their names.

[JurgenG]

I would suggest that 90%, if not 99%, of the people have a very short trace back to a village (e.g., anyone you meet in Bangkok likely has parents born in some village). And that village knows the complete history of the family. In fact, many people in that village are probably all related to "your" family in some manner. People didn't move around in the not too distant past.

If you can get someone to go with you and spend some time with some old folks in the home village, and old folks love to talk about yester-year, you will learn all you want to know.

Not so easy actually. Mother side, I could probably do as you said, but for the father side it's a bit more complicated. "Officially" they are third generation immigrant, from China, but I can find relatives in a government position at the same time they would have arrived, I'm surprised you go straight from China to government or there is something I haven't been told. And there is no stories, I know the other branches family for having met them during family gathering.

On the other hand, we have a friend, there is a small museum dedicated to her family and she didn't even know it. But as CanadianGirl said, at that time they have a very typical Chinese name and now they have a Thai family name, if I hadn't been told, I would never had made the relation.

That's why I was inquiring about a "private investigator", who can check archives and interview people to understand more about this family. They represent a couple of years of my life, I would like at least to try to know them before I leave.

[sbk]

Thats a tough one, sure you can get someone to go through the amphur records etc but that doesnt tell you who they are or were. My best source of information has been my husband tbh, I asked lots of questions and he asked around. His grandfather died at the age of 93 and had alot of interesting stories to tell. Other old people in the village were also great to talk to, mostly you are going to find those stories more interesting than names and dates.

[Pacificperson]

JurgenG

In my humble opinion if the family wanted you to have details, they would have provided them to you. I have trouble understanding why you would want to hire an investigator to do a deep background search on a soon to be ex-girlfriend's family. Three and four generations ago was a time of upheaval and not always pleasant choices. I would respect your girlfriend's family and leave this one alone.

[bina]

i think this is a great subject actually. my oldest daughter asked the same thing, since israelis are notoriously obsessed with geneaolgy and past history etc... we tried to do a family tree with anon's family since there were the usual amount of sister's kids and and kids of 'like sisters' kids in the houses, and tons of pi/nong .... i spent a lot of time asking anon's mom about her life and it turned out that she had had quite a few children that never made it beyond three years old, including a born dead male twin of my husband! that he never knew about. and husband was raised by a 'like a sister' girl that somehow came to join the family at some point, (she recently recontacted him and spoke to me it was all very exciting); several uncles and aunts from both sides of family that have since died (no one actually really discusses dead poeple which to israeli minds is horrible since we have a national obsession with the dead/past people, including naming our kids for dead relatives to keep memories alive blabla).

i really would like to do a genetic research project since the KORAT folks seem to all have similar last names, and personality traits rather like certain arabic families here that make up entire villages have (same genetic diseases etc). i have found that past history doesnt seem to interest almost any of the men ive met here; whats dead is gone and tomorrow is an other day. i had to explain that to the visa lady when we went to do anon's visa; she kept asking me questions about my family int he states, my past history so she could question him. finally i told her she would have better luck asking him wht recipes he used on our news years special dishes... he's never asked me about my past, ive told him the outlines of the prertinent info which he promptly forgot. he doesnt even remember names of friends, they are all lung/pi/nong/pruen/, not to mention aniversary, birthdays (doesnt even know his parents birthdates, etc.)

doesnt seem to be culturally pertinent. at any rate, we did hear lots of stories of the agricultural kind (the years there was no rice in the village, the year the americans marched down a road near anon's school and there was a mine that went off and he was injured and taken to some hosppital (he's not even sure where) and his parents came.... or when someone had an amazingly beautiful stud buffalo, etc...... btw, there is one spirit house (a large one) that is inhabited by most of the ancestors of his family and whenever we left the village we had to honk, to say sawadee, sathu..... but whose spririts actually are there, no one could tell me.

i feel really bad that we might not get back to thailand (i wont get back) before his parents become to old/incapacitated etc to tell me more. also, all the grandkids loved hearing these stories that they had never heard before, but never ever thought to ask about either.

here on kibbutz we have many people studying how to do oral histories and traceing families (from morrocco, turkistan, even shanghai!), and its a fascinating thing, but its not a private detective that does it. its actually just a lot of time and patience collecting, recording, video and then putting the conflicting pieces of info together. (turns out that anon has a katoey uncle with a 'husband' but he isnt discussed much; and certain arguments withing the family led to his father not speaking with two brothers but the kids (anon and siblings) do speak with the cousins , all down the road from each other.

nott hat this answered your specific question but can give u clues as to thais and family background. possibly city thais kept better track of relationships especially those with royal lineage (had a friend from onw of those families, studying with me in the states many years ago.)

as someone said, villagers keep their papers in shoe boxes, plastic bags, things get lost, chewed up, burnt down, tossed out, anon's birth certificate is so fragile its barely readable, so i have it stored properly here in israel (and scanned). puu yai baans are a good source of info since they used to be the more literate folks in the village that had to record births deaths and land (very very important, land ownership).

as far as changing names, yes they change their names for luck, new passports etc but villagers have a good oral memory history of names of people; and some last names were given by royalty i forgot when, because it used to be that villagers had only thier first names. just tried to ask anon what his last name means since a large group of koratians have the similar last name ending. he said we have to ask his great grandparents (dead)but now that ive asked him, he would like to know also....

good luck

bina

israel

anon thinks that their last names came from royal 'masters' feudal lords that ruled the area of korat.... who knows.....

[bonobo]

I am a genealogy nut, and I am lucky that I have English ancestors on both my father and mother's side. With the English being perhaps more anal about family records, I was able to connect into the royal families and then get more of my family tree from the scholars who had already done the research. On my German, Irish, and Italian branches, the information died out after only 5 generations.

I think the same problem will arise in Thailand. The tradition of keeping family records just isn't here. There are no family Bibles with the last 6 or 7 generations written there, no detailed government records. Thailand is still mostly agricultural, and no one thought it necessary to keep accurate records of each field hand growing rice.

The Chinese used to keep very good records, with some family trees reportedly going back 3,000 years, but Mao ordered all those records destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. If those records had been kept, then some Thais who could trace a Chinese connection might have been able to go back from there. But as it is, I doubt that many Thais can go back very far.

[Thongkorn]

I am a genealogy nut, and I am lucky that I have English ancestors on both my father and mother's side. With the English being perhaps more anal about family records, I was able to connect into the royal families and then get more of my family tree from the scholars who had already done the research. On my German, Irish, and Italian branches, the information died out after only 5 generations.

I think the same problem will arise in Thailand. The tradition of keeping family records just isn't here. There are no family Bibles with the last 6 or 7 generations written there, no detailed government records. Thailand is still mostly agricultural, and no one thought it necessary to keep accurate records of each field hand growing rice.

The Chinese used to keep very good records, with some family trees reportedly going back 3,000 years, but Mao ordered all those records destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. If those records had been kept, then some Thais who could trace a Chinese connection might have been able to go back from there. But as it is, I doubt that many Thais can go back very far.

I am sorry to have to tell you many people can plug into the Royal family , Kings from the past seduced many poor girls. they were openly called the kings bastards.

[sbk]

Actually, many kings had mutliple wives.

Anyway, back on topic, yes the oral stories are the ones remembered and no, birth dates are not important to rural Thais in my experience. My MIL didn't know her own birth date but could tell you how old my husband was and what season it was when he managed to burn down half his uncle's coconut plantation trying to get honey

[tim armstrong]

My forbears - mostly Scots, more recently Irish, didn't get on too well with royalty. Many of them seemed to have their heads lopped off. A few smart ones became soothsayers and preachers, and were probably able to create enough fear and uncertainty in superstitious local lords to stay out of trouble. My Thai wife knows a bit about her central thailand ancestry - mostly Lao but as others have said few papers were kept. It seems that a few Thais have a good knowledge of larger scale migrations and community origins than individual families. I have a Thai friend who took me to such a village near Chainat where old people still speak Lao and can trace their origins back 3 generations, but its all on a whole village scale.