Dare Family Tree

The Chinese character used for our family surname means to have gratitude or to give thanks. However, the anglicized versions of the family surname have many forms such as Xie, Tse, Dare, Dear, Dea, Der, Ja, Hsieh, … That was because anglicized version of Chinese names were phonetic transcriptions rather than a translation of the meaning of the Chinese character. Although PinYin is now considered the standard for anglicizing Chinese characters, it was not available when most of our ancestors had established their English identities. As such, phonetic transcriptions will vary by the spoken dialect used and how the name had sounded to the immigration or other official who registered the name at the time a person's English identity was being established. Our home village is in the Kaiping district of Guangdong Province. But family members had moved around some, and they had emigrated from China at different times which give rise to some of the variations in forms used by the family branches. At the time, the exact spelling of names was not a sensitive issue, and some names had been modified just by frequency of use. Another reason is that some family members had emigrated using a purchased "paper names", in with case their name will be represented by their assumed name. For our family tree, "Xie" will be used to represent our family surname, and all Chinese names, if available, will be shown in parentheses using PinYin.

"XieWeiDong" is regarded as patriarch of our family, as he provided the information via his personal journal that provided the needed information to initiate the Dare Family Tree project. He was an intellectual, and thus he was highly influential within the family and in the community in which he had lived. He had a large family, five sons and four daughters from each of two wives. He had recognized that opportunities for his family to prosper will be better in the United States, and he worked hard to promote and facilitate their emigration abroad. Even after family members had emigrated, he maintained contact with them, and he advised them on when they should return to China to marry, to help escort others who are traveling to America, or to help sponsor family members in the immigration process.

"XieWeiDong" had essentially two separate family units, one with each wife. To include both family units in the same data base, Wei Dung's father, Git Thlen Tse, "XieJieXing", had to become the root or the first-generation member of the family tree. This family structure then places Wei Dung along with his siblings to form multiple trunks for second-generation members of the family tree. This also allows "XieWeiDong" to have two separate trunks, one for each family unit. The other parts of the family tree formed by the "XieWeiDong's" siblings would be known as "Cousin Trunks and Branches" since we don't have the information from "XieWeiDong's" journal to input to the family tree data base.

Since starting the Dare Family Tree, we have received many inputs from family members to fill in missing data. We continue to rely on all family members to give us input to update our Dare Family Tree to make it more complete, and to keep it current.

Our family tree includes all descendants. However, the traditional family trees only continued to trace the lineages having the family surname, and female member's lineages were not retained when they marry. Thus, a lot of the early lineages of female family members were not available. Another thing to note in the early part of the tree is that female spouses marrying into the family do not have their given names recorded. The tradition then was to refer to them only by their maiden surname and "Shee", which is the title for "Mrs".