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Category Archives: General
New Online Addendum
The following information is not included in the first edition of the book. However, it is available on this website now and will be included in the second edition of the book that is under development.
Years by Ruler and 60-Year Cycle
Part 1 (Ancient): GoJoSeon, Silla, & GoRyeo Years
Clan List
I added a list of Korean surnames and clans based on the 2000 A.D. South Korean census. Check it out at http://koreangenealogy.org/book/online-addendum/surnames-clans/
New Family Search Tutorials
Family Search added outstanding video tutorials on how to do Korean Genealogy!
https://familysearch.org/ask/korean-training
This is in addition to their great online library of records and information:
https://familysearch.org/search/collection/location/6118214?region=Korea
https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/South_Korea
Korean Family Websites
Korean Adoptees Searching for Birth Families
This organization can help Korean adoptees who are searching for their birth parents or seeking to reinstate their Korean citizenship.
https://www.goal.or.kr/.
Inje Genealogy Library
The Inje University Genealogy Library is by far the best source of Korean genealogical records available.
http://genealogy.inje.ac.kr/main/main.php
The Inje University Genealogy Library’s online library of JokBo is incredible. They have recently changed their policy and no longer require registration to access the books online! They did this to make JokBo research resources more broadly available to everyone. This is wonderful.
There is still one hurdle for English speakers who want to use this library. Viewing the books requires installing a browser add-on / application that only works with Windows Explorer (no problem) and the Korean version of Windows. Please note that the Korean version of Windows is not referring to an English version of Windows with a Korean font installed.
There are two approaches to overcome the “Korean Windows” hurdle. 1) Install Korean Windows on a computer. I got a little $250 laptop (smaller than a laptop, actually) that has a Korean version of Windows XP CE on it and that worked well. I also emulated a Korean version of Windows 2000 using VirtualBox (free software at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) on a more powerful PC running an English version of Windows 10 and that worked well, too.
Korean Family and Kinship Terms
Korean Genealogy advice from the Geneology Star blog
Online OCR (automatic image to text)
Abby Clout OCR is an online OCR service at http://cloud.ocrsdk.com/Demo/ . They offer 50 free sample runs and charge for anything beyond that. You can upload an image (a scanned page from a Korean JokBo genealogy, for example) and it will automatically convert it into text that you can copy and paste into an online dictionary. I selected Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese when I ran this test. It isn’t perfect, but it is excellent and can save you a lot of time when translating JokBo records.
In the test run below, the left is the scanned source image and the right is the text result. The results are great. There aren’t many OCR packages that output text in the same format as the source — this is a great product for Korean genealogy work.