The Chinese character for the Dare family surname, shown on the left, means "thanks" or "gratitude". The pronunciation of the name may vary with different spoken dialects. Even within the the various local vicinities of GuangDong (formerly known as Canton) province where the family had its roots, many different dialects exist. So as members of the family move to different areas for whatever reasons, the pronunciatiation of the name changes.

In the early days when family members had started emigrating from China to the United States, there was no standard phonetic representation for chinese characters. Thus anglicized representation of Chinese names were at the discretion of the immigration official conducting the interview. Because family members had emigrated at various times using different immigration officials, and with variations in the pronouncing of names, our surname has evolved into many different anglicized forms such as "Dare, Dear, Der, Dea, Tse, Ja, Hsieh, and etc". There is also the situation that some members of the family may have obtained different identities to circumvent the Exclusion Act which had been enforced for a period of time before it was deemed to be unfair and thus recinded.

The inclusion of actual Chinese character for names would help to correlate the commonality in surnames and middle names which may be assigned to distinguish members of the same generation. It was not possible to store actual Chinese characters in this computer data base. Since PinYin, based on the BeiJing form of the Mandarin dialect, has evolved as the accepted dictionary standard for anglicizing Chinese characters, it was used to represent Chinese names in the Family Tree. Our surname is thus written as "Xie" and one of the intra-generational names such as "Doo, Joe, Cho, etc" is written as "Zu". PinYin representation of Chinese names, if available, will be affixed as "trailers" onto the given English name. Unfortunately, the accent marks couldn't be affixed to the pinyin representation of the characters to make them more precise.

Colloquial representations of a Chinese name, if it was commonly used by an individual, will be included as his/her English name. You may also note that the names of many female spouses ends with "Shee" or "Shi". That is actually the Chinese character noting their title which is similar to "Mrs." In the older Chinese custom, female spouses are generally referred to only by their family Surname followed with "Shee" or Shi" and their full name is not always known. Another traditional custom is that men in the earlier generation have several names, a given name at birth, taking a second name to signify that he is now married, and sometimes he may be accorded a third name in honor of his longevity. For example, our patriarch shown above was given the name "WeiDong" at birth. After marriage, he took on the name "BicNgum" and later in life, he was accorded the name "SongWoon". For consistency, we will try to list each person by his/her given name if it is known.

The Dare Family Tree begins with our ancestor "XieJieXing". His second son, "XieWeiDong", was a brilliant scholar, and he had provided a wealth of information pertaining to his family that was beneficial in getting the family tree started. "XieWeiDong" had a very large family consisting of ten boys and eight girls. Within the family he had pioneered travel to to the United States and he had actively helped members of the Dare family to emigrate to the United States. In this family tree structure, "XieJieXing" is listed as a first generation member, "XieWieDong and his siblings are second generation descendants and the rest follow in progression.