Foreword

By Mr.Tăng Thiên Thại

(9^th generation)

In 1976, Mr. Tăng-Thự  completed a family tree genealogy of the Tăng family with its roots at Minh Hương, a village of Hội An city in the Quảng Nam province of Việtnam. This document covers the members from the 1st to the 8th generation.  The accumulated data was written in Hán by Mr. Tăng-quang-Thảo in 1866 and was later updated by Messrs. Tăng Huynh, Tăng Dục, and Tăng-kim-Giám. 

As of this date, all the members of the 8th generation have left this world, and the descendants of the 9th generation are mostly of advanced age.  Mr. Tăng Thự (who has passed away) gave me this invaluable document, which I believe is the only one still in existence today.

In order to help prevent the loss of this document and to continuously update its data, I have decided to disseminate it after reorganizing the available data to include the 9th and 10th generations. I have also tried to present it in the simplest form for easy reading and reference.

The most critical shortcoming that has affected this document started with the 9^th generation onward: the period that saw the splitting of our country in two, followed by three decades of a very bloody war. During this difficult period, contacts between different generations and branches were severely restricted, relations were disrupted, and achievements by our family members could not be recorded to enhance the status of the Tăng family.

It is our hope that the younger Tăng generations will be interested in looking back into our roots, and will continue to update our family tree. With the help of our children’s skills, this family tree could be presented in a more vivid and entertaining form through the use of CD or DVD or whatever new technologies which be coming in the future.

Thanks to our combined efforts, future Tăng generations should be able to relate to one another more closely, and different braches of any generation could find out how they are connected at a family level as well as an individual level.  

We think that this document should be presented in both Vietnamese and English versions for the fact that many of our members have settled outside the US, and in the not very far future, our descendants will be much more fluent in English and other languages than Vietnamese.

We hope that the wide dissemination of this family tree booklet will keep us all together inside the ever increasing and expanding Tăng family.

We also hope that by knowing our roots, we will try to strengthen our relationship and warmly welcome our members to form a worldwide network of Tăng relatives from inside Vietnam to the whole world outside.

 In conclusion, I want to sincerely thank Mr. Tăng Thự for having sent me the first Tăng family genealogy in Vietnamese, and Mr. Tăng Thiên Tài for having provided me with precious photographs used in this document. My thanks also go to Tăng Nhựt Thăng and Tăng Nhựt Trường, respectively my eldest son and grandson, for helping me complete this document, which has been distributed to our relatives in Việtnam and also in the US, France, and Australia.

	Mr. Tăng-Thự	Mr. Tăng-thiên-Thại	Mr. Tăng-thiên-Tài	Tăng Nhựt-Thăng	Tăng Nhựt-Trường

Lai-viễn bridge or Pagoda bridge in the Hội-an ancient city