Help me translate anglicised name back to chinese

[me3]

Hi,

I hope someone can help me translate a family name that has been lost. In the 1870s my ancestor with the surname Lewsam married in Australia. He was apparently born in Guangzhou, Shunde, Guangdong, China. He and his wife had several children, which were registered with the surnames at different times of Leu Sam, Lew Sam, and Loussam. I am presuming that these are anglicised versions of his original name, which I would very much like to know.

If anyone can help, even with a guess, it would at least give me something to go on as the family records stop here for this bloodline.

Cheers!

[skylee]

I think it is unlikely that the original surname had two syllables. I guess the surname should start with an L, which means it can be 劉 (Lau) / 盧 (Lo) / 勞 (Lo) / 呂 (Lui) / 羅 (Lo / Law), or other less common surnames. In brackets are how these names are usually romanised in HK (based on Cantonese).

If you have any documents with his personal information they would be helpful. With the information you provided it is hard to say what his name really was.

[me3]

Thanks for your help with this. All I have is "Samuel Lewsam born about 1841 in Guangzhou, Shunde, Guangdong Province, fathers name either Samuel or Henry, mothers name not recorded." Is it possible given the first name of Samuel that the surname was a romanised concatenation of a Chinese name ie. Lewsam came from Leu Sam or Lew Sam or Lou Sam, with the Sam expanded to be the Samuel?

This is all I have to go on unfortunately.

[Lu]

In Surinam, when Chinese contract workers were brought in, the Dutch didn't quite get that Chinese have their given name after their surname, and recorded people as Tjon A Leung, Tjin A Lin, such surnames. Their descendants these days still have such triple surnames. The same may well have happened to your ancestor, his name may have been LEW Sam, which was misunderstood as Givenname LEWSAM.

[陳德聰]

I'd suggest trying to find other people who came from the same area, find out how their early names were romanized, and go from that. You can be almost guaranteed it will have absolutely no correlation to the common romanizations skylee posted from HK.

The only friend I can think of whose family came to Canada early and whose last name is romanized as "Lew" (and also has a Chinese name) has the last name 廖.

I'm not really familiar with how the samyap dialects sound so I can't really make a backward guess from the romanization, so if you can find anyone else from Shunde in your parts to maybe give you a better idea of how they pronounce the possible surnames (I'd say 呂 is a pretty strong possibility too), you will probably be on the right track.

For the "sam" part... I'd say given what Lu said, you might be able to figure out a list of possible characters for his given name from a list of characters with jyutping "sam" or "saam". Not a super hefty list but not particularly narrow either.