📖 中文版 — 点此查看中文导览 → · This is the English guide to Lijie's family; a Chinese-first version is at /zh/.
Eesley · Wildermuth · Zhou · Li
Lijie's family of Qingdao, Shandong — an English guide.
Welcome to Lijie's side of the family archive. This archive was built together by Chuck Eesley and Lijie Zhou 周丽婕. It records Chuck's American families — the Eesley and Wildermuth lines — alongside Lijie's family of Qingdao: her father's Zhou line and her mother's Li and Shang lines. This page is the English doorway into Lijie's side, for relatives on Chuck's side who want to know the people they'll meet.
Chuck's grandfather Robert Earl Wildermuth — a WWII B-24 navigator, a 1948 Stanford biology graduate, and a lifelong genealogist after the war — left a note on the last page of his memoir addressed to "the family researcher of the future." This whole archive is the next generation's answer to him.
The relationship backbone of the American Eesley line comes from Chuck's great-aunt Mary Eesley Bean's 1985 family history; the modern genealogy is maintained by Dale Eesley on FamilySearch and now carries more than 3,400 family members. The structured tree can be downloaded from the archive's GEDCOM page.
📖 If you read only one thing, read this: Family Threads — the values and practices that run across the generations. It's a synthesis essay that names the common threads running through three generations and across the Eesley, Wildermuth, and Zhou branches — education, patience, record-keeping, returning to the places that matter, service, humor, daily presence, the Japan-and-China curiosity, and the impulse to cross oceans for what's next — each anchored to specific people, documents, and places in the archive.
The Zhou and Li family of Qingdao
Lijie's lineage, as recorded from the updated family tree (June 2026), can be browsed by generation below. Each person's page carries both English and Chinese; names are shown in Chinese characters with the pinyin spelling beside them.
Lijie herself
- Lijie Zhou 周丽婕 Wife of Chuck Eesley.
Lijie's parents
- Zhou Ling 周玲 Lijie's father.
- Li Xun 李恂 Lijie's mother.
Grandparents
- Zhou Zhaoxiang 周兆祥 Lijie's paternal grandfather.
- Sun Yunzhe 孙云哲 Lijie's paternal grandmother.
- Li Zhongchu 李仲初 Lijie's maternal grandfather.
- Shang Yaozhen 尚耀真 Lijie's maternal grandmother.
Aunts and uncles
- Zhou Quan 周全 Lijie's paternal uncle; brother of Ling Zhou (Lijie's father).
- Zhou Ai Qin 周愛琴 Lijie's paternal aunt; sister of Ling Zhou (Lijie's father).
- Zhou Ai Hua 周愛華 Lijie's paternal aunt; sister of Ling Zhou (Lijie's father).
- Li Mengling 李孟令 Lijie's maternal uncle; elder brother of Xun Li (Lijie's mother).
- Li Bo 李勃 Lijie's maternal aunt; younger sister of Xun Li (Lijie's mother).
Great-grandparents
- Zhou Maoli 周茂礼 Lijie's paternal great-grandfather.
- Pang Huancai 庞焕彩 Lijie's paternal great-grandmother.
- Li Fengting 李丰庭 Lijie's maternal great-grandfather.
- Qiu Rongjing 邱蓉镜 Lijie's maternal great-grandmother.
- Shang DeChen 尚德臣 Lijie's maternal great-grandfather on the Shang side.
- Tan Chune 譚春娥 Lijie's maternal great-grandmother on the Shang side.
Great-great-grandparents
- Zhou Huiting 周慧亭 Lijie's paternal great-great-grandfather.
- Leng (Zhou) 冷 Lijie's paternal great-great-grandmother.
Great-aunts and great-uncles
- Zhou Zhaozheng 周兆帧 Lijie's paternal great-uncle — brother of her grandfather Zhaoxiang Zhou.
- Zhou Xiuzhen 周秀珍 Lijie's paternal great-aunt — sister of her grandfather Zhaoxiang Zhou.
- Shang Yaoxiang 尚耀香 Lijie's maternal great-aunt.
- Shang Yaofu 尚耀福 Lijie's maternal great-uncle.
- Shang Yaoli 尚耀礼 Lijie's maternal great-uncle — the elder of Yaozhen's two brothers (Li Xun's 大舅, her eldest maternal uncle, older than Yaofu who was born 1925).
- Li Yunhua 李蕴华 Lijie's maternal great-aunt.
- Li Chengwu 李城武 Lijie's maternal great-uncle on the Li side; brother of Zhongchu Li (Lijie's grandfather), Yunhua Li, and Yunying Li.
- Li Yunying 李蕴英 Lijie's maternal great-aunt; sister of Zhongchu Li (Lijie's grandfather).
Places
- Qingdao 青岛 — the modern hometown of the Zhou, Li, and Shang lines.
- Jiaozhou Shi 胶州市 — the ancestral place of the Zhou line, where Lijie's grandfather Zhaoxiang Zhou was born in 1930.
About the Chinese name characters
The surnames on Lijie's side — Zhou, Li, and Shang — are confirmed. The given-name characters (the part of a name after the surname) were the editors' best transliteration guesses until Lijie's family confirmed them. Confirmed names are marked "characters confirmed by the family."
Names confirmed by the family:
- Sun Yunzhe 孙云哲 — Lijie's grandmother
- Zhou Ling 周玲 — Lijie's father
- Zhou Quan 周全 — Lijie's uncle
About the generation-name characters
Chinese families often share a single character across all members of one generation, drawn from a generation-poem written by an ancestor. The tree suggests the Zhou grandfather generation was named on "Zhao" (兆) — Lijie's grandfather Zhou Zhaoxiang 周兆祥 and his brother Zhou Zhaozheng 周兆帧 share it — and the Shang maternal-grandmother generation on "Yao" (耀) — Shang Yaozhen 尚耀真 (Lijie's grandmother) and her siblings Yaoxiang, Yaofu, and Yaoli share it.
If anyone in the family keeps a genealogy book or a generation-poem, we'd love to record it — it's one of the deepest lineage documents a Chinese family can hold.
The rest of the archive
Chuck's American families (the Eesley and Wildermuth lines) are the larger part of the archive:
- Home
- All family members
- Long-form documents & memoirs
- All places (including Germany and England)
- Photo & letter archive
- 中文导览 — the Chinese-first version of this page
This English guide to Lijie's side was built by Chuck and Lijie. For any correction, addition, or name confirmation, contact Chuck directly.