How were marriages registered ?

Hi Anneliscec,

For your information I had a search done it the HK BMD office and came up with nothing. I then tried St John's but they said that records of the time - between 1880 and 1895 has been destroyed or lost. Can't remember which.

I think my great grandmother Ching Ah Fung was baptised a Christian in The Stag Hotel in 1891. This is mentioned from a Carl Smith archive card. He mentions she was baptised by a Mr Ost of the London Missionary Society. I checked with them in the UK but that year he returned to the UK and did not make his annual report!

I know that she was baptised as I have a letter to her from another member of the London Missionary Society which was sent with a gift of a bible for her to pass on to my grandfather, her son John, when he got married in 1906.

Incientally in his Will my great grandfather makes it clear that Ching Ah Fung was his wife as he says his children whether born in or out of wedlock were to recerive equal shares in the event of her death or remarriage.

I suspect that such missionaries may have performed marriages in their own churches or homes and left it at that.

Sean

This is more trivia than useful input, but the first Chinese man to be married by civil service in Hong Kong was George Chun, on June 7, 1877 ( to a woman from Canton) at the Supreme Court. Rather ironically he was the son of Chun Tai-Kwong, a onetime protege of the Bishop of Hong Kong. His sister Elizabeth married George Orley, a member of the Hong Kong Fire Brigade and Inspector of Markets, in 1872. (Hence a footnote about this appearing in my book.

Sorry I don't know, Annelise, I just found the relevant China Mail article reporting it as the first civil marriage of a Chinese man, published on that day (or the day after, I can't access MMIS now to confirm). Apparently there was quite a crowd at the Supreme Court to witness the event.

Annelise - might be worth asking Bernard Hui if there is a register hidden deep in the archives. My great grandfather's Will is there - Bernard found it for me. Made in 1892. So there must be other legal stuff there as well.

I'll ask him if you want.

Sean

Hi Annelisec,

If Bernard Hui's records look hopeful please let me know. I am quite happy to buy you lunch!

My great grandfather would have married Ching Ah Fung - perhaps calling herself Ellen - between 1890 and about 1895.

Luck please!

Sean

Hi, Sean.

Which collection of the LMS did you access in the UK? I understand SOAS has the mother lode and that there are also copies of the collection spread out in various university libraries around the world (http://www.mundus.ac.uk/cats/4/251.htm)

And how did you find that letter amongst such a vast collection? Did you do a name search or did you seek help from a librarian? Any tips you might have would be appreciated!

GC

Hi Annelisec,

Will send an email to Bernard and say I authorise him to relase any info regarding John and Ellen (Ching Ah Fung) marriage records to you for onwarding to me,

Sean

Hi GC,

It was several years ago and, as I remember I was passed from piller to post. Unforunately I have changed to Macs since then and the emails that I used then were lost in the changeover of systems.

From memory I emailed the London School of Oriental Studies who passed me to I think Manchester University. They appraently hold the LMS papers. I had the name of the clergyman and date from the Carl Smith collection so the archivist there was most helpfu and was back to me in a few days with all the detail I needed.

As my memory is not as good as it was my I suggest that you Google the LMS and follow the threads from there. Otherwise try the School of Oriental Studies. They too were most helpful.

If you hit the right place and have names and dates you should be OK.

Hope this has been helpful.

Regards,

Sean

Hi, Sean and Annelisec,

Many thanks! Most helpful!

GC

This will be good to summarise and turn into a checklist. If you've looked up a marriage, please could you leave a comment below telling us where you looked and what you found?

Currently I can think of three sources:

1. The government's registry records
2. The religious institution (typically a church) where the marriage was performed
3. The armed-forces' records

I've found a few more odds and ends in Google to add to Annelise's initial post:

1865: The Blue book contains statistics for births, deaths and marriages.

1868: HK Governor tells UK government no reliable statistics of births, deaths, marriages are available. (This seems to contradict the presence of statistics in the 1865 Blue Book) Further, he doesn't think registration is necessary. http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=i0MoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT730&dq=history+reg...

1872: This book says "Church registers date from the colonial period, while vital registration began in 1872." Does "vital" include marriage? http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=oHR7IeMcayYC&pg=PA347&dq=history+reg...

1875: Ordinance #14, on 7th Sep 1875 was enacted "to provide a register of marriages celebrated in Hong Kong": http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkgro/view/g1875/694789.pdf

Some interesting points:

• Anyone (typically a 'minister of religion') who had a register from before this date was required to provide a true copy to the Registrar General. So the Registry office may have records dating from before 1875.
• Apart from marriages in licensed places of worship, it was also possible to be married in front of the Registrar General, without a minister present.
• Anyone under 21 and getting married for the first time, needed a parent/guardian's consent.
• "XXXIX. This ordinance shall apply to all marriages where one or both the parties profess the Christian religion". I wonder when this was replaced, and all marriages had to be registered regardless of religion?

1876: The Gazette announced the following places were licensed for the celebration of marriages: http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkgro/view/g1876/691978.pdf

• St. John's Cathedral, Victoria
• St. Peter's Church, Praya West
• St. Stephen's Church, Tai-ping Shan
• Union Church, Staunton Street
• Berlin Foundling House Chapel "Bethesda", High Street
• Basel Mission Chapel, Third Street, Sai Ying-pun
• The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Wellington Street
• The Church of St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Street

Regards, David

PS And while a quick skim didn't show any information about registration, this book looks to explain a lot about Chinese marriage customs, including concubines: http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=tHDjmLquCboC&pg=PA43&dq=history+regi...

Ages ago now I asked for a search to be done of the government records to see if I could find my great grandfather's marriage.

I can't remember the cost but gave them a five year period to search to no avail.

If memory serves me correctly they suggested St John's. That seemed to be a blind ally as after a long period of time I got a reply saying that their records had been destroyed during the Japanese occupation.

Unfortunately all the relevant details of my messages disappeared in a change of computers.

That's my tuppence worth for the moment though Annelisec knows I have written to Bernard Hui.

Sean

Yes, a checklist would be a very useful thing to have as a resource page with links. The extra links you sent are very useful.

Likewise, a similar checklist for births/deaths register research would be very useful, especially for people tracing ancestors born in the 1870s and 1880s. As I understand, the Births and Deaths Ordinance came into force in 1873. But again, would it have been likely that Eurasian children born in this decade had their births registered by their Chinese mothers? I do intend to do a few searches in the registry in the next few months so I will let you know of the results, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has tried this route.

GC

Hi GC,

Just to let you know that the first of my Eurasian ancestors who was born and died in 1879 was registered and also was buried at Happy Valley although his mother simply referred to as Y - she was Kum Yau - on the gravestone. See The Chinese Connection at www.thehongkonglegacy.com

Hope that helps.

Sean

Hi, Sean.

Thank you very much! This is encouraging to hear that you were able to get birth certificates, as a couple of my relatives were born in 1875 and 1876. Gives me some hope that there might be something in the registry.

Cheers,

GC

It looks as though marriage records could exist in either / both two places:

1. The records of the church that performed the marriage
2. The marriage registry
3. Am I missing any?

Church records

• St John's Cathedral: Record HKMS40 at the PRO is described as 'Registers of Marriage, 27.03.1838 - 05.04.1975'. View details.
• Peak Church: Record HKMS42 at the PRO is described as 'Counterfoils of Marriage Certificates, 20.09.1913 - 06.06.1933'. View details.
• Other churches - if you've tried contacting a church for marriage records, please could you leave a comment below to let us know how it went?

Marriage registry

• There's no way to search online, or even to go and search in person. The only option is to send in a request (and payment), and wait for the registry to perform the search. Here's the official page on how to apply, and Christine Thomas also has some notes about it.
• I don't see any detail about what they have, which years are missing, etc. Has anyone seen this information anywhere?

Regards, David

Hi David,

I have a dim and distant memory of somebody in St John's Cathedral telling me that some marriages were performed in the churches belonging to the particular group - ie Baptists, London Missionary Society, etc., and were recorded at that time and place.

I mentioned to annelisec that I had also been told that records of the earlier years had been destroyed during the Japanese occupation. That is clearly not correct as is shown by your note. I have emailed Bernard Hui to say annelisec has my authority to look for John 1 and Ching Ah Fung or Ellen as she may have been called.

Unfortunately I lost a lot of my "historic"emails when I changed computers several years ago so am relying on memory.

I wonder has anybody else heard of these marriages performed by ministers who had their own churches, chapels or meeting houses?

Sean

Hello Cheufay,

Let me reinforce Sean’s assertion that you may well be successful with a birth record search in the 1870s-1880s decades. You will see from the Births, Marriages and Deaths website that you can either request a ‘Particular Search’ (HK$140) if you can specify the date of birth within 5 years or a ‘General Search’ (HK$680) if you need to search over a longer period. In the case of John Olson’s first son, John, ‘Infant son of J. and Y. Olson’, my great-grandparents, the year of birth was given on the gravestone as 1879. In the case of his daughter, Hannah, I had no clue about the date or place of her birth or death and had been given an English name for her mother, in order to throw me off the track of her Chinese descent. I went in person to the BMD office and put in a General Search. They won’t accept a time limit for that. It did take between 1 and 2 months for the answer to come back, but a birth record was found for 1880 giving the name Yau Kum as Hannah Olson’s mother. That explained the ‘Y’ on the gravestone. When Sean first contacted me, he assumed that we were descended from common great-grandparents, John Olson and Ching Ah Fung. Not so! I think John Olson may have been punctilious about registering his children. Registration may have depended even more on the father than on the mother. Good luck with your search.

Jill

Just to add to the completeness of Jill's posting. The general search is of course the way to go if you need longer than five years.

I have just one caveat with Jill's posting and that is that she feels our shared great grandfather may have been punctilious about registerng his children! Somehow I am not so sure.

Certainly his profession does not point that way and, if we take it that he married in the early 1890s and arrived in HK in the early 1860s in his early 20s, it gave him a long time to sow his wild oats.

The other explanation may be that if a marriage had taken place it was illegal not to register births. Though we assume John Olson did not marry the first Chinese woman he had children with we do so only because of the wording of his Will. Does anybody know if there were laws governing the registration of children in HK at that time?

John Olson may also have been heavily influenced by a very strict religious upbringing in Sweden but that sort of enforced morality usually fades when out of sight is out of mind.

Sean

Enter the HKGRO: http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkgro/index.jsp

and type in Registration in the search window.

The first entry will be the 1872 Registration of Births and Deaths Ordinance.

[Admin: here's a direct link to the ordinance]

Thanks moddsey, as usual you have solved another conundrum.

The 1872 Ordinance makes it mandatory to register all births. That settles the question once and for all.

I take back the question mark I placed over the probity of my great grandfather!

Sean

Sean, you may be too hasty in taking back your question mark. Whatever the law may have said, it is a fact that many Eurasian births were not registered. I recall this created something of a problem when ID cards were introduced, as many older residents were unable to produce birth certificates.

Hello, Jill.

Thanks for relating your experience. It's interesting that you say John Olson may have been punctilious about registering his children. If that was the case, I wonder if he was a minority among foreigners who fathered children with Chinese women in mid to late 19th century Hong Kong. My impression from the research and reading I've done so far, and this may be wrong, is that since it was the Chinese mothers who, in the majority of cases, took up with the task of raising their Eurasian children, they would have been the ones who did the registering most of the time.

In the area of education, for example, they seemed to have been the ones who pushed their sons to get the best schooling, owing to the large number of Eurasian boys who were enrolled at Central School and the Diocesan Boys' School and eventually became successful compradores or public servants. Social prejudices at the time meant that most European fathers of Eurasian children were largely absent from the day to day lives of their "secret" families. Some may have left property or financial support for the mother but that was the extent of their "fathering." Except for a few who chose to remain in Hong Kong until their dying days (and were sometimes buried beside their Chinese partner), most men returned to their country of origin to settle down with local women there.

I'm not sure if this is your or Sean's experience, but by far the most mysterious figures in the family history for me are the original Chinese mothers or "protected" women. Unless they owned property, there is hardly any information to be found in the public record about them. Even when gravestones can be found, often only the surnames and married names are given (not the full Chinese name).  So far, I've relied on Carl Smith's article "Protected Women in 19th Century Hong Kong", which is a good place to start:

http://tinyurl.com/44q3u2e

If anyone has any useful tips/experience to share on where and how to search these women, I'd be pleased to hear from them!

Cheufay

Thanks both to Jaberu and Cheufay,

I'm sure you both have both made good points and perhaps I am wrong to ascribe the complete answer to the 1872 registration ordinance.

I can't speak for Kum Yau, the Chinese woman with whom my great grandfather John Olson had two children, only one of whom survived, but in the case of Ching Ah Fung, who it seems he married and is buried close to him in Happy Valley as Ellen Olson, perhaps she had means of her own to bring to the marriage as she left a Will of around $15000 when she died in 1915.

She also took on the upbringing of Hannah the oldest surviving child of John's union with Kum Yau but perhaps he was married to her as well. Or was this a regular arrangement?

On the subject of education you are quite right as the Carl Smith arcives show the family going to the Diocesan School.

Finally, it occurs to me that John may have been punctilious and obeyed the Ordinance as he may not have been a British subject - he had arrived from Sweden -  and was in a way over anxious to obey the laws of his adopted domicile.

None of this alters the original question which was whether it was possible to check births that far back. Seems if you are lucky you will find what you are looking for.

Thanks again,

Sean

Hello again Cheufay,

I wish I could help with information about “protected” women. I’ve been unable to find any information about my great-grandmother, Yau Kum. It’s a very common name, but can be expressed with different Chinese characters, of which I have no record. In her case, I suspect that Sean and I may have both been filling the coffers of the BMD office with General Search fees to no avail. I’m interested to hear from moddsey that it was a legal requirement to register deaths from 1872, which either means that Yau Kum may have died elsewhere, or that the Ordinance wasn’t observed. The gravestones in the European cemeteries are a great resource, but I wouldn’t know how to look for a Chinese grave, if her family had conducted the burial. 

 It seems to have been quite usual to have two wives at the same time. I haven’t searched for a specific marriage registration for John Olson and Yau Kum who nevertheless bore his name. I was recently a guest at an Anglo-Chinese marriage, at which as much importance seemed to be laid on the tea ceremony for the Chinese relatives as the Christian service. I believe the tea ceremony could stand alone to seal a union between Chinese families, but I don’t know whether they were officially registered as marriages, nor whether my great-grandfather would have been so absorbed into the Chinese culture by this time to undertake this form of marriage contract. As to mistresses, my 80+ cousin, who was brought up in Hong Kong, claims that European men had “mistresses galore”. Sean remarks that our great-grandfather had been in Hong Kong since the 1860s, well before the registration of his first child in 1879. There is as yet no record of children born to Olof and Anders Olson, John’s brothers who joined him in Hong Kong. Can we assume that these young men were celibate? I have been challenged enough searching for immediate relations without looking for possible ancestors born before 1879, but I would be surprised not to have cousins in Hong Kong whom I don’t know about. I suspect that registration by mothers would slightly depend on their literacy and social standing. 

Thank you for the reference to Carl Smith’s article. I’ll look it up. It sounds as if you have quite a task ahead of you, if you are looking for several relatives without their full names. I hope that others with better local knowledge than me may be able help you. 

Jill

It seems to me that Jill is quite right when she says she (and I) probably have unknown cousins in HK. In that case of John's brothers it is probably unlikely that Anders had issue. He seems to have hardly landed in HK before contracting smallpox and dying. Olof on the other hand had plenty of time so it is likely he fathered  children if he was so inclined. John too had plenty of time before he either met and married Yau Kum or Ching Ah Fung who became Ellen Olson.

The death cert I have for Ching Ah Fung was obtained by my uncle W.O.Olson and says it is a true copy of an entry in thea register of deaths in Hong Kong and was obtained on 4th February, 1986 and is stamped by Yien Pui-lun.

It is in the name of Ellen Olson, says she died on October 20, 1915 at 161 Wanchai Road, was a housewife and died of chronic bronchitis heart failure. It says the informant was J.Olson of 98A Wanchai Road, HK on 20th October, 1915. The registrar was W.B.Rowlands and the number given in the first column is 155 N.C.

I am not sure why she died at a different address to my grandfather but I do know that he died at 98 Wanchair Road and for a time 98B was occupied by other members of the family.

I suspect that Ching Ah Fung probably took the name Ellen when she was baptised. Ah Fung was christened on September 20, 1891, by the Rev John Ost of the London Missionary Society while she and John 1 were living at the Stag Hotel on Queens Road. In the Register of the London Missionary Society’s Chinese Congregation on September 20, 1891 there is a mention of Mrs Olson at the Stag Hotel being baptised by Mr Ost. It also says that she has five children. That indicates that Hannah, although not her daughter was living as a member of the family which may indicate that Kum Yau died shortly after Hannah’s birth and Ah Fung brought her up.

Ah Fung was obviously serious about her conversion because in 1906 she received a letter from another member of the LMS asking her to pass on a present to her son John who had just got married.

The letter to Ah Fung was written by the Rev Thomas W. Pearce and was accompanied by a copy of the bible which was inscribed:

John Olson - 1 October 1906
TWP and MAP

Psalm 127 'Except the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it'

The letter, which is dated 1.10.06 on London Missionary Society notepaper, reads:

Dear Mrs Olson,
Mrs Pearce and I having in mind the wedding this morning of your son, and much regretting that we cannot be present at the ceremony and subsequent reception - beg your son's acceptance of a small marriage gift in the form of an English Bible.
Will you be good enough to convey this gift to your son whose career we shall continue to watch with great interest and for whom and for his bride we pray every blessing from Almighty God.
Trusting that the events of the day may be as you all desire.
Believe me. With the congratulations and good wishes of us both.
Yours very truly,
Thomas W Pearce

As a member of the London Missionary Society in those days before ecumenism the Rev Pearce would have probably not wished to cross the Catholic threshold and would equally have not been welcomed by the Catholic clergy.

Have probably bored everybody enough but it does show that there were and are records and that it may well be that we are not looking for the right names. That's the next problem!

Sean

Sean and Jill,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences. Fascinating stuff!

My challenge is that the various candidates I've identified for the original European ancestor - Mackenzie - did not leave much trace of their lives in Hong Kong or Canton, especially in the wills or baptisms department. I think my next step will be to see what I can find in the HK Memorials and Rates and Assessment Books records at the PRO, which show the properties that Europeans left to their "protected" women.

Cheufay