Before Google: "Han" family emblem

As soon as we were told about the assignment, Before Google, my heart raced. I just had the perfect example for the assignment: my family emblem. Family names in Korea, at least in the eyes of the foreigners, are not as diverse as the English, French or Dutch. Anyone with dozen Korean friends would find recurring family names such as Kim, Park, and Lee.

In fact, dozens of branch families exist under the same last name and even my family name, Han, has at least 40 different branch families. Out of which, I came across the pedigree of my particular family over the summer. At the very first page, the family emblem is displayed, with specific description that this emblem stands for this particular branch family of "Han". There is a website in Korea ran by the main "Han" family which manages and serves for every person with "Han" as last name in Korea. However, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find any online resource for my branch family.

I inquired my father about this difficulty and he told me that our family publishes the pedigree every decade and any changes will only be reflected if physically mailed to the head family-in-charge. It was extremely interesting to learn of such matter in 2017 and this actually made me feel very special and proud. Such tradition evoked greater respect and love for my branch family. It was strange to learn of such information through offline resource and I felt extremely exclusive to have known the truth. My father even refused to send me picture of the family emblem over text-messaging; this added more clouds to the mystery.