Page 99 - Gan's Family History

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Assembly of the Yan clan in Sze
Ping, Te Hua County.
After recuperating from the tiresome
trek, Yan Chiao Hsien was granted
a piece of land where he could build
his homestead, as a gathering
assembly for fellow clansmen from
the same ancestor, and farm to
provide for his immediate family. He
left his father in Fu Chou and moved
on to Sze Ping, Te Hua County to
claim his land and establish his
family branch in Shih Che hamlet.
The Yan clan, having formed
and taken root in the south, began a
new register, recording the
particulars of immediate families and
fellow clansmen from the same
ancestry. Eventually, it built the
Yung Mao Ancestral Hall and
placed therein the tablets of past
patriarchs in honour and
remembrance of the family's pioneers
in Te Hua County, following the same
tradition as practiced in its former
northern homeland.
The clan flourished in Fu
Chien Province and its new
descendants soon scattered to
several regions from Te Hua County
to the extent that, at one stage, it was
impossible to trace back which
branch of this family or that family
came from that settled in Yung Chun
county. Order was eventually
restored when a new set of word-
ranks was obtained to identify the
seniority from one generation to
another of the descendants within
the Tau Chang or its present name,
Tau Yuan clique.
Formation of the Tu Shan chamber in
the Yan Clan
17th Generation Yan
Yan Yuan Shan, the 17th generation
descendant of ancestor Yan Ching
Mao, whose word-rank was Shang,
voluntarily left his eldest brother and
three nephews in Shang Chang, Shih
Che hamlet, Sze Ping village, Te Hua
county and settles with his family in
Tu Shan area to start his own blood-
line of descendants of the Yan clan
from here.
The migrants, having
established themselves with a new
homestead and farmland in the
vicinity of Shih Ku hamlet, Min Kang
village, Mu Jen administrative unit,
23rd capital, Yung Chun County,
erected a Hall for the Yan pioneers in
Fu Chien province and tablets of all
the preceding patriarchs were lined
in the inner sanctum of the building.
It is from this village that his
descendants flourished from one
generation to the next and a copy of
the records and tablets kept in the
Chen Mei Ancestral Hall, one of the
six prerequisite copies, was handed
down by Gan Kim Hee (1901-1959)
to his immediate families and fellow
clansmen in Seremban, Negeri
Sembilan, Malaya, who were
descended from this branch.
From this journal, a complete
register and record of the Tu Shan
elders could be compiled and
rendered into the English version to
become an invaluable guide to the