The DNA search for ancestors of 麥世鹏.

The aim is to find the home village of 麥世鹏.

For those of you following this story for my first outline of ‘Mak’s life' and the quest to find his Chinese family, I’ll provide updates from time to time on progress.

We’ve now done two tests a YDNA and a ‘family finder’ both with FamilyTreeDNA .

The Y-DNA test has yielded one match.

This leads the descendant of a man who was adopted in the early part of the last century by a family with who gave him their surname. The fellow who did the test has passed away and his descendants don’t know anything about his adoptive family except that lived in Guangzhou and spoke Cantonese.

Now they know that somewhere they have a 麥 connection – and from that an Australian connection. Perhaps this fellow's father became an orphan in the conflicts around the 1911 revolution.

The family finder tests also showed one match.

In this family, there is also no knowledge of a 麥 surname. One side of the family comes from Guangzhou and the other from Hong Kong so may well have also originated in Guangzhou on the mainland. At the moment it is impossible to tell which side of the family the 麥 connection is.

One other distant connection was made more recently, though again the family have no knowledge of the 东 name. This third family currently live in Dongguan, China, and have apparently always lived there. A possible pointer to our man's origins.

Dongguan (东莞市) is a significant industrial city in Guangdong Province, China. It is in the Pearl River Delta bordering the provincial capital of Guangzhou. Dongguan's city administration is regarded as progressive in seeking foreign investment, ranking behind only Shenzhen, Shanghai and Suzhou in exports. It is also home to one of the world's largest shopping malls, the New South China Mall – nothing to do with New South Wales though… 

In Mak Sai Pang’s time Cantonese was widely spoken as well as Hakka. Today’s population mainly speak Mandarin. 

So, while we don’t know which city Mak Sai Pang came from, Dongguan is a candidate. However, further information on the family trees of the three matches mentioned would be needed. Finding closer DNA matches to people with certain 麥 ancestry is also necessary.

If you know someone with a 麥 (‘Mak’ or ‘Mai’) ancestry please encourage them to take a DNA test and document their family tree - and let me know the outcome.

麥 turns out to be a widespread surname in Guangdong and is seldom found outside the province. It is not ranked among the 100 most common surnames in China and not even listed among the 507 surnames in 百家姓 of Surnames of the hundred families (which obviously contains five times as many surnames as the title implies). 

So, although there are still millions of possible 麥 family connections, the home base is somewhere in Guangdong. But which city?

Famous people with the surname 麥

If you have any suggestion for famous people please let me know and we can run some mini-biographies.