Then & Now | The reverend historian of early Hong Kong society, with his floor-to-ceiling index card databases, who shone a light on a neglected past
- Reverend Carl Smith was the ‘Doyen of Hong Kong Studies’, an amateur historian who burrowed into old records to reveal the lives of families
- He filled his flat with floor-to-ceiling databases of index cards, long before personal computers, and left a legacy that underpins much history writing
No one involved in Hong Kong historical work can ignore the enormous debt owed to the pioneering social history research conducted by Reverend Carl Thurman Smith, known affectionately for more than three decades as the “Doyen of Hong Kong Studies”.
Long-ago lives that were largely lost to posterity have re-emerged from history’s shadows as a result of Smith’s groundbreaking research.
Meticulous burrowing into basic primary source information, such as land records, commercial directories, membership rolls of trade guilds, temple committees, mercantile associations, cemetery and baptismal records, in tandem with careful cross-referencing, allowed a more comprehensive picture of early Hong Kong society to emerge than ever before.
Born in 1918 in Dayton, Ohio, in the United States, to a comfortably-off family that owned an ice cream factory, Smith studied theology and divinity and then became an ordained clergyman. During that time, he developed an absorbing fascination with genealogy and local history research, and periodically lectured on these subjects.
Through these scholarly interests, Smith became acutely aware of the importance of basic primary source materials, in particular information contained in parish and cemetery records.