Park Pyeong-sun
Overview
Park Pyeong-sun (박평순; 朴平順) is a Korean-style personal name combining the surname Park and the given name Pyeong-sun, and it is a representative name shared by multiple people rather than referring to one specific person. It appears with high frequency among people born in the first half to the middle of the 20th century, especially women, and the name is encountered sporadically in various primary and secondary sources such as local histories, rosters related to independence movements, oral records, and newspaper pages. Accordingly, the entry Park Pyeong-sun is more accurately understood as a personal-name entry that deals together with several people who share the same name and with the issues of records and identification surrounding them, rather than as a biography of a single person.
Main Content
Composition and Characteristics of the Name
The surname Park (朴) is the third most populous surname in Korea after Kim (金) and Lee (李), accounting for approximately 4.19 million people, or the 8 percent range of the total population, as of the 2015 Population and Housing Census. The given name Pyeong-sun can be written in Hanja in several ways, including 平順, 平淳, 平順, and 坪順; for this reason, there are not a few cases in which the notation differs among family registers, closed registers, and local materials. Pyeong (平) means flatness and peace, while sun (順) means smoothness and gentleness; the name was widely used as a female name after the modern period and is especially frequent among those born in the 1940s and 1950s. Since the 1960s, the frequency of this name in naming newborns has declined greatly, and it now shows a generational characteristic of being found relatively often among older age groups.
People Appearing in Records
In documents and public records, Park Pyeong-sun appears mainly in three categories. First, there are figures in local histories and rosters set against the Japanese colonial period, the liberation period, and the Korean War. This name is often seen in lists of participants in the March 1st Movement, records of regional patriotic enlightenment movements, and village-level local histories, but because there are many people with the same name, additional information such as clan seat, birth year, and residence is essential to identify an individual. Second, there are figures who were active in local community fields such as education, religion, rural leadership, medicine, and volunteer service, and their names remain in local newspaper pages and in materials compiled for city and county gazetteers. Third, there are narrators in life-history records collected in oral history and women's history research. In oral recording projects dealing with modern and contemporary women's experiences of labor, family, and migration, many narrators with common names appear.
Difficulties in Identification Due to the Name
The issue of namesakes creates practical confusion in records management. Hanja notation is not fixed to a single form, and Japanese colonial-era notation and Republic of Korea family-register notation differ by period, so in the process of integrating databases the same person may be split into multiple entries, or, conversely, different people may be merged into one, producing misattribution. Cases in which people are confused and cited incorrectly in media reports or academic papers also appear in connection with this.
Records and Research Methodology
When dealing with personal names, it is recommended to record at least four identifiers together: clan seat, birth and death years (or birth year), main residence, and occupation or field of activity. In addition, a procedure is needed to cross-verify records held by the National Archives of Korea, the Korean History Database of the National Institute of Korean History, the archives of the Independence Hall of Korea, and local government local history archives. For oral materials, it has become standard practice to leave the recording date, the interviewer, and the scope of consent together so that follow-up research can re-verify them.
Recent Trends
In 2024-2025, the digitization of person information and authority control are expanding rapidly. The Korean History Database of the National Institute of Korean History and the records search service of the National Archives of Korea are continuing reorganizations aimed at reinforcing person-information linkage and namesake identification functions, and discussions in the library community on building personal-name authority records are also under way. In addition, with advances in OCR and speech recognition technology, the conversion of local histories and oral recording materials into text is accelerating, and personal-name data that had not previously been indexed is accumulating in searchable form. Regional women's oral archive projects promoted by local governments and women's history research organizations are also expanding, and life-history records of women with common names have begun to be systematically preserved. On the other hand, issues under the Personal Information Protection Act concerning the collection and disclosure of information on living persons continue to be discussed, and there are ongoing indications that legal review must be conducted in parallel with the construction of personal-name databases.
Related Topics
- [[동명이인]]
- [[한국인의 성씨]]
- [[인물 전거 통제]]
- [[구술사]]
- [[한국사데이터베이스]]