Recently working with two organizations that are analyzing and indexing Chinese and Korean “jokbo,” I had an epiphany — actually two epiphanies. The first is that Chinese “jiapu” and Korean jokbo are very different. They serve different purposes and have very different content. I and everyone else on these two teams assumed from looking at the two styles of documents and seeing the generational lines and the Chinese characters that they are very similar. Their structure is, but in content, they are completely different. That was the first epiphany. The second difference was revealed when I looked at how wives are handled in each case. In the Chinese jiapu, women are mentioned only by their surname, with little other information. Often the document lists a home town and sometimes a father, but not enough information to find out more about them. Most importantly, the Chinese do not have a “bongwan,” which is how Koreans keep track of the ancestral home of the founder of the clan. In the Korean jokbo, it is of major importance. It is the key to finding the records of the wife. Jokbo, like
