Genealog y in the sustaining of families

SINCE 2002, the descendants of Datuk Jenaton have continuously gathered to strengthen their kinship and recall their origins and identity. The first meeting in Ipoh saw the reunion of some 800 members of the family, ranging from the surviving fifth generation to the newly born ninth generation.

And the family has continued to meet quite regularly — this year is its seventh gathering in 14 years. It is time to be acquainted and reacquainted with long-lost cousins — laterally this ranges from siblings to first and fifth or sixth cousins with common ancestors reaching to the grandchildren, and children of Jenaton himself, once domiciled on Bukit Datuk Jenaton (now Minden and Universiti Sains Malaysia) in the middle of the 1700s. He died in 1789 and was buried at the hills which are now at Persiaran Changkat Minden 1 in Penang.

Jenaton, who hailed from Pagaruyung in the Minangkabau court, was granted a 40ha piece of land by the 19th ruler of Kedah, Sultan Muhammad Jiwa Zainal Adilin II, who reigned from 1710 to 1778. That land now covers the areas of Minden, Bukit Gelugor and Sungai Gelugor.

This year, the family meets today in Shah Alam. As the years go by, the family genealogy keeps expanding, with many gaps to fill, and corrections to names, dates, places and marriages. New branches were discovered and narratives developed. Names, places and events continue to surface and resurface in family conversations. Versions of stories may vary.

But there is a focal centre. There is an identity and a consciousness. I have often asked the family members why they have “chosen” Jenaton as the centre of the family’s lineage. And curious as to why the consciousness of most of some 5,000 family members from around the Malay archipelago and other parts of the world draws from the Minangkabau identity.

There are, to be sure, other ethnicities and identities in the lineage, with their origins in other parts of the world, mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Arab world, and China. And the intermarriage of the children of Jenaton in Batu Uban (as appearing in family records) and his many grandchildren depict the emergence of the Jawi Pekan and Arab Peranakan identities on the island, much earlier than had been popularly believed from the many offspring of the Kapitan Keling — Cauder Mohiddeen Merican (born 1786).

But down the line in the last century (and continues till today), the descendants of Kapitan Keling have intermarried with descendants of Jenaton, and other notable families in Penang.

Quite interestingly, the island, being geographically small, but much connected to the region with diverse ethnicities and cultures, has produced a highly complex genealogy. Visualising the various available genealogies, and putting them together into a coherent piece, conjures a diverse mix of communities and identities — an endless web of overlapping networks of names, some with dates and places, and of numerous other hitherto unfamiliar families and genealogies beyond our imagination. There are definitely various layers of narratives.

Many may claim to be related but ignorant of the linkages. This is why it is important to know our origins in time and place. Some of us may dabble in our family tree as a hobby, but as the tree grows — both up and down the line — it becomes a responsibility to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct narratives. There will be many surprises in between, intrigues, myths and legends. It is a lesson in history.

Most Malay families may not be able to identify their roots beyond their grandparents or perhaps four generations earlier. The exception are royal families. And recently I chanced upon Megat Terawis: Journey to our Roots (2016).

Megat, Nik, Wan are Malay names that are traceable to the past. But the typical Malay family do not have surnames, unlike Europeans, Arabs and the Chinese.

The author Alex Haley too, did not go by surnames, because there was none. Remember Kunta Kinte? Haley’s Roots captured our imagination as a popular television series in the mid-1970s. Published in 1976, the book, was not without controversy.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the trajectory of the Jenaton narrative, as an example of a Malay story in Malaysia. The rantau of the Jenaton chieftain, especially from the Minangkabau heartland of Kampung Bodi, Payakumbuh to Batu Bara on the east coast of Sumatra, and finally to Kedah and its island of Pulau Pinang before it was called Penang, is a narrative on the evolution of a Malay family and identity transcending the Straits of Malacca.

The genesis of the family, initially centred on Batu Uban, Tanjong, and Trong in Perak, is now dispersed through the archipelago. Apart from the Klang Valley and other parts of Malaysia, a branch of the family is now domiciled in Batu Bara and Medan, and Payakumbuh.

Over the years, several books, with different approaches to searching for origins, have been written based on oral histories, genealogical records and other family documents.

Aziz Ishak, former Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives (19551963) and a fifth generation descendant, wrote Katak Keluar dari bawah Tempurung (1987) and Mencari Bako (literally In Search of Roots) (1983). Muhammad Yusuf Morna penned Sejarah Batu Bara dari Masa ke Masa (2010) while I wrote Batu Uban: Sejarah Awal Pulau Pinang (2015).

Other family members such as cousins Insun Sony Mustapha and Fazil Suhaimi Talib, who are heritage researchers and family historians in their own right, have done much in developing a modest archive of the multiple origins of the larger family.

Of note is Aziz’s Mencari Bako, much referred to by the family, historians and scholars. It is an autobiography of post-colonial significance of Aziz’s journey to Sumatra in the 1970s in search of his ancestors. Jenaton was illusive. His narrative stopped at Pagaruyung. It is left to the younger generation to depart from where Aziz left off, and expand the genealogy and story of the family.

What began as a simple search for origins based on several crude versions of the family tree, initially recorded by Jenaton’s grandson, grew and wove episodes into stories, becoming part of local history, along the way, contributing and complementing, and countering too, the nation’s narrative.

What has been discovered is that genealogy is not only personal history. It fits into the broader national community and the evolution of identities over time, in this case, transcending nations and geographies.

It tells us where we came from, and with recent developments and discoveries in genetics research, how old our DNA inheritance is and how we get to where we are now. Genetics reveal that we have multiple origins, displaying many ethnicities.

A genealogy acquires a life through the interplay of many forces — cultural, geographical, historical, sociological, linguistics, genomics and even literary. But as the larger Jenaton family may have realised, identity is a consciousness by choice.