Diversity and Innovation in the Genealogical Records of Chosŏn Korea

Abstract

Genealogical records in Chosŏn Korea took diverse forms across the centuries, each of them providing a window onto an elite ethos that included innovative ideas about kinship and society. The earliest surviving genealogical records show bilaterality, recording both female and male lines in equal detail, and sometimes also included extended records on maternal ancestors’ families. A typical patrilineal genealogy in the shape of a pyramid, in which the daughter’s descendants were largely suppressed, began to emerge from around the late seventeenth century. A genealogical diagram in the shape of an inverted pyramid, by contrast, traces bilateral ancestors equally from the focal person, usually the compiler. This diagrammatic intervention, which had several variations, reveals both familial anxiety over socio-cultural changes brought on by the patrilineal turn, and the persistence of the pre-Confucian social order in which both maternal and paternal ancestries were important. It also rescued ego by foregrounding the focal person who would have been one of thousands of collaterals in a pyramid shape genealogy, and enabled elites to embrace a starkly different understanding of their roots and the relatedness of people to their contemporaries.