clans, lineage, extrapolation, etc.

My Korean birth name is Shin 신. My record doesn't give the Chinese character though, so I can't be sure which clan I come from (申,辛,愼). Apparently I was born in Kyonggi-do, though, which may be of geographical significance. Wiki implies that Shin is an fairly common family name with nearly a million people identifying as such in 2000. Only a few family names reach the million mark; Kang, Kim, Park, Lee, Chung, Cho, Choi. Yoon and Shin are the only 900k ones. I'm actually surprised that there's no Hanji in my record. Shouldn't you use Hanji for official stuff? I don't know if I mentioned it here already, but they tried to white-out my parents names, though I can easily see my mother's name is Jeong Sook. Dunno about the father's name though. The white-out is thicker over his name.

The record also states my mother has two sisters and one brother, so I'd have aunts and an uncle to complicate things, though that's interesting in itself. Cousins? It says my mother's parents had a "commercial business". My mother was 18 when she had me. If my grandmother was 20 when she had my mother, she would be 58 now. My mother is 38. I'll say my grandmother is +- 5 years, so 63 still isn't that old. I'd say there's an 80% she's alive, since she had a "commercial business", which might imply middle class and access to medical service. I'd say this "commercial business" would be an invaluable clue if I were to search. If I get better at reading Korean I could easily access some kind of business documents from the 80's: how many businesses run by Shins in Kyonggi-do do you think there are - Shin is 1.0% of the family name population? [however, the problem, I said, was that I don't know which specific Shin clan I belong to...but I wonder if that even matters?]



[luckily the consonant S in Korean is the same kanji for "people" in Japanese (hito/jin, 人) so it's easy to remember]

The record says my mother was admitted to Esther's temporary home for unmarried pregnant women in the Eastern Child welfare center, which I also assume must have cost a lot - I'm guessing this only since abandoned children probably had mothers who didn't have enough money to live in a care center before birth.

My first legal guardian was Dr. Kim Do-Young - he also gave me my given name. Was he your legal guardian?

I'm pretty sure I'll go to Korea. Maybe when I graduate around May 2011, only on the condition that I obtain some level of confidence in the language. But damn is Korean hard...