Below is the The Straits Times article covering the Tan family reunion in Singapore. My mother and her sisters are mentioned:
Tan Tock Seng's kin here for reunion
July 25, 2008
150 members of the clan are meeting to mark 210th birth anniversary of philanthropist
By Serene Luo
SOMEWHERE
in London, you might encounter a strapping police sergeant with ginger
hair and clear blue eyes - nothing unusual, till you ask for his name.
Mr Lawrence Tan Xu Wen, 39, never fails to raise eyebrows when he says
it. He would have you know that his ancestor was philanthropist Tan
Tock Seng, 'a famous founder of Singapore, my dad told me'.
Mr Tan,
a sixth-generation descendant, is among 150 members of the Tan clan who
have gathered in Singapore to mark the 210th year of Tan Tock Seng's
birth.
Yesterday, 30 of them presented a copy of the Tan family
tree to the Peranakan Museum in Armenian Street. The document - with
1,368 names running in a scroll almost 19m long - is the result of
research into the family's genealogy done mainly by Mr Lawrence Tan and
Mr Roney Tan, a Singaporean.
Of the family members gathering
here, more than 30 are from overseas. Many have non-Peranakan and even
Caucasian spouses and now live in England, Australia, Hong Kong,
Thailand, Malaysia and the United States.
Mr Lawrence Tan's
Caucasian looks come from his father and grandfather's marriages to
Caucasian women. His 76-year-old retiree father Gerald Tan, who married
an Englishwoman, is himself the result of the union between his
Straits-born Peranakan father and a Scotswoman. He had fled Singapore
by boat as a boy in 1942, just as the Japanese landed in Singapore.
Mr
Lawrence Tan said: 'When you're a boy, the name 'Tan Tock Seng' doesn't
mean anything to you. He's just some old man. But as you get older,
family becomes most important.'
Mr Gerald Tan passed down this
love of family to Lawrence, who became fascinated by his family's
genealogy when, 15 years ago, an aunt gave him a weathered photocopied
sheet listing 30 family members.
Mr Lawrence Tan now spends his
spare time hunting down more members of the clan to add to the family
tree. Six years ago in Singapore, he met Mr Roney Tan, a
fifth-generation descendant, who helped him fill in several blanks.
Along
with the family tree, the clan also lent the Peranakan Museum a rare
painting of Tan Tock Seng and a photograph of one of his
great-grandsons, Boo Liat.
Tan Tock Seng, a Malacca-born
businessman best known for donating $5,000 in 1844 to start the
hospital that today bears his name, gave money to bury the destitute as
well. He also gave money to start the Thian Hock Keng Temple in Telok
Ayer. He fathered three boys and four girls and was 52 when he died in
1850.
Mr Roney Tan, who organised the reunion, said the family
is still looking for more members of the clan. He estimates that 80 per
cent of them live in Singapore, another 15 per cent in Malacca and 5
per cent elsewhere.
The family gathering, the second after the
first one three years ago, opened last Saturday with a dinner, followed
by a trip to Malacca this week by some of them.
The merrymaking
continued last night at the Penny Black pub in Boat Quay - formerly a
shophouse owned by a son of Tan Tock Seng. The family will attend the
Founder's Day celebrations at Tan Tock Seng Hospital today.
Clan member Evelyn Ang-Trottier, a 63-year-old college professor who now lives in Seattle, said she felt 'so much pride'.
'I feel closer to my family now. And I have a lot of relatives I didn't know about before.'
If you are a descendant of Tan Tock Seng and wish to be added to the family tree, e-mail info@family-tan.com
