Martyr's Daughter Yuseom's Shrine

History & origins

Yu Seom-i was born in 1793 as the daughter of Blessed Augustine Yu Hang-geum. During the Catholic Persecution of 1801, Yu Hang-geum was arrested with his younger brother Yu Gwan-geom and was martyred outside the South Gate of Jeonju. Under the system of collective punishment applied to the families of those convicted of high treason, the nine-year-old Yu Seom-i could not escape punishment either. She was banished to Geoje as a government slave and was forced to begin her life on the island, separated from her family and home.

For a long time, her life almost disappeared from the central narratives of Church history. More concrete details came to light when the scholar Augustine Ha Seong-rae, while preparing an annotated study of Saheon Yujip, the collected writings of Ha Gyeom-rak, a former magistrate of Geoje, found records concerning Yu Seom-i. Those records describe her efforts to protect herself as she grew older and the circumstances in which she preserved chastity through a long life in exile. Modern church-historical scholarship has continued to reconstruct her life by reading Church documents together with official and private Joseon-era records and literary sources.

Saheon Yujip also records that in 1863, while Ha Gyeom-rak was serving as magistrate of Geoje, he received a report that Yu Seom-i had died at the age of seventy-one. Ha wrote that he arranged the materials needed for her funeral, ordered that a suitable burial place be chosen, and had the words “Tomb of the Seventy-One-Year-Old Maiden Yu” carved on a rock beside the grave. This passage shows that her death and burial are preserved in a contemporary written record rather than resting solely on later tradition.

As documentary research restored her forgotten name and life to public memory, Yu Seom-i came to be recognized as a figure who broadens our understanding of the Catholic persecutions in Korea. Her story makes clear that Church history must remember not only those who were martyred but also the family members who were punished with them and then had to endure long lives afterward. The tomb today is the concrete place where that recovered memory is preserved and connected to the land in which she lived and died.