Genealogy
The generation poem
辈分诗
Every child of one generation takes the same character in their given name. That single character fixes a person's place in the line exactly — which is why one character is often enough to say where someone belongs, and why this register never guesses at a generation.
60 characters are recorded, so the poem carries the line to its 60th generation.
Find your generation
Enter the generation character from your name, or from your father's or grandfather's.
Stanza 1 · generations 1 to 20
- 1 万
- 2 翁
- 3 宏
- 4 朝
- 5 世
- 6 保
- 7 王
- 8 廷
- 9 中
- 10 文
- 11 水
- 12 木
- 13 火
- 14 土
- 15 宇
- 16 大
- 17 有
- 18 光
- 19 于
- 20 先
Stanza 2 · generations 21 to 40
- 21 正
- 22 家
- 23 在
- 24 孝
- 25 德
- 26 辅
- 27 国
- 28 纪
- 29 显
- 30 勋
- 31 祥
- 32 书
- 33 泰
- 34 孚
- 35 日
- 36 昌
- 37 明
- 38 应
- 39 运
- 40 兴
Stanza 3 · generations 41 to 60
- 41 安
- 42 全
- 43 开
- 44 盛
- 45 会
- 46 纯
- 47 厚
- 48 福
- 49 乃
- 50 成
- 51 脩
- 52 善
- 53 荣
- 54 华
- 55 美
- 56 才
- 57 猷
- 58 页
- 59 树
- 60 嘉
About this record
The association's 1996 booklet records that the Hainan line descends from four ancestors — 万春、万秋、万里、万全 — who crossed to the island some seven hundred years ago. The poem's first character is 万. Whether the poem's first generation is theirs is something the association has not yet confirmed.
The characters here are the association's own record of the poem. If your family's copy differs — a character written another way, or a longer sequence your branch continued — please tell us. We would rather hold a note about a disagreement than print one version as though it settled the matter.
Note that the generations counted on that page start from the ancestor the surname itself comes from, not from the founder of this line. The two counts are on different scales.