Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Jue Shee's College Photo- Misidentified ?

Previously, my Auntie Soo-Yin and I thought we had discovered a photo of my great grand uncle, Jue Shee as a student at Berkeley in 1898. The original picture is a group photo of students in a summer engineering surveying class. This class was an undergraduate class required for students in civil , mechanical and mining engineering and was usually taken in  junior or senior year.The original photo as well as more information on Berkeley at the time can be found in this previous post. Since the time of that previous post we have done extensive research into the story of Jue Shee. We have determined that although Jue Shee later told everyone after his return to China that he had attended Berkeley and graduated with a degree in mining, this actually never occured. The reasons for the fiction and Jue Shee's true life story as we currently understand it will be detailed in a future post. UC Berkeley's annual registry of students and the Blue and Gold annual yearbooks have been digitized by Google Books. During 1898 there were only a couple of Asian students enrolled in engineering programs. I believe the picture that we thought was Jue Shee is actually of a Japanese student named Yoneshiro Shibata who was a student in mechanical engineering. The photo detail of the Asian student in the 1898 picture is followed by a yearbook picture of Shibata who is a junior in the 1899 Blue and Gold Yearbook.  Shibata graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1900.  


                Detail of  Asian Student in picture of Engineering class surveying outing 1898.



No comments:

Post a Comment