Chinese-American Genealogy: Resources

 Welcome to another blog entry on the Chinese-American Genealogy webinar! If you or a customer wants more information, here is a comprehensive and easy-to-navigate resource written by the webinar presenter Alice Kane of NEHGS.

Resources

• Census and city directories
• Many railroad workers dispersed to urban areas after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad
• State and local resources
• Restrictive ordinances created taxes, fees, and records
• Check for Chinese specific legislation in the area you're researching to see which agency or department recorded information and collected fees
• Many discriminatory ordinances were aimed at Chinese, for example, an ordinance aimed at Chinese laundries in San Francisco fined hanging laundry on rooftops, however all others were exempt by omission from law
• Registration and fees (1850-)
• City/town annual or clerk's reports
• City/town codes or ordinances
• Voter registration/poll tax (1944-)
• With repeal of Exclusion Act could become naturalized and vote
• Local clerk's office or election department
• Land registries and Assessor's records (1848-)
• Despite discrimination, some Chinese were able to save enough money to buy property
• Local or county land registry and Assessor's office
• Military records
• Many Chinese in America served in WWII after the repeal of the Exclusion Act
• Records stored in St.Louis damaged in 1973 fire: destroyed 80% of army's records from 1912-1960 and 75% of air force records from 1947-1964
• Alternate sources could exist at state archives or state adjutant's office in the service person's state or residence
• Gravestone records
• Headstone will often name province and ancestral village, however, for married women it may list the ancestral village and home district of her husband's family 

Gravestone for a married couple

• 
  
• Certificate of Residence
• Had to be carried on person as required by Geary Act
• Check archivegrid.org; search for "Chinese certificates of residence"
• Rare; no central repository

Joy

Chinese-American Genealogy: Special Considerations

Names

• Custom agents wrote Chinese names phonetically and how they heard the name may have depended on the speaker’s regional accent
• The family name comes first, followed by the given name (the custom agent could have and did put them in any order)
• Males can have many names through their life, such as a birth name, marriage name; a man may adopt a new given name to mark a significant achievement
• The Hundred Families Surnames is a list of common names. It represents less than 5% of all surnames ever recorded, but also represents 85% of today's surnames used world wide http://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~chinesesurname/hundred.html

Jiapu

• Jaipu are Chinese lineage books that trace the male members in a family in a particular region of China
• If females are mentioned at all it is usually by family name only
• Jiapus contain vital statistics, family origins, location, maps of burial grounds, migration patterns
• Each generation incorporates a single character in sequence of the verse as part of their given name. Those familiar with the family poem will know exactly which generation from the first ancestor the particular individual is a member of.
• The largest physical collection is at the Shanghai Public Library. The catalog is in Chinese and you can view pdf images of jiapu.
• Ancestry and FamilySearch have some jiapu digitized. You can begin the search in English but it will get into Chinese.

Translation

• Pleco.com has a free translation app. Basic usage is free, if you pay for the app you can scan images and use OCR to offer a translation

Dates and Calendars

• You may encounter dates written by the year of reign of a particular emperor. Here's a partial list of past emperors:
• Tongzhi 1861-1875
• Guangxu 1875-1908
• Xuantong 1908-1911
• Republic of China est. 1911
• Date calculators
• For dates on or after 1901 use http://www.hko.gov.hk/gts/time/conversion.htm
• For dates before 1901 use http://www.asia-home.com/china/lunarsol.php

Joy

Chinese-American Genealogy: Understanding the History

Recently I watched a webinar on Chinese-American Genealogy by Alice Kane of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society. It had a plethora of wonderful information, and fully proved that understanding the history is critical to genealogical research. 

Many Chinese immigrants came from the Siyi region, and included the former counties of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping, Xinhui in the Pearl River Delta of southern Guangdong province. They mainly departed from Guangzhou, but also departed from Macao and Hong Kong.

Migration influences included the Taiping Rebellion, famine, drought, economic failures and the lure of the American Gold Rush. The Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad drew many Chinese laborers, who may have made multiple trips back and forth between China and the U.S. as sojourner workers.  

After completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 there was increasing competition for work between Chinese American and European laborers that led to violence, discrimination, and legislation against the Chinese. Most prominent among these acts was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. and barred those within the U.S. from naturalization. Those currently in America had to obtain certificates of re-entry to be able to leave and come back. Merchants, diplomats, and students could still enter the U.S., but were closely scrutinized. Restrictive acts continued, and included requiring Chinese in the U.S. to carry a resident’s permit, preventing Chinese from testifying in court, and denying bail in habeas corpus cases. Relief wasn’t in sight until 1943, when the Exclusion Act was repealed. Following acts in 1952 & 1965 abolished the quota of only 105 Chinese a year, and switched focus to an emphasis on an immigrant’s skills and relation to U.S. citizens. From 1959-1966 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), operated the Chinese Confession Program to curb illegal Chinese immigration. It asked Chinese residents in U.S. to confess their illegal entry in return for legalizing their resident status.

The destructive fires from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake proved beneficial to Chinese immigrants in that it destroyed documents. A Chinese male entering the U.S. could claim he was born in San Francisco prior to 1906, or he could claim to be a “paper son” of a U.S. citizen. Paper sons or paper daughters is a term used to refer to Chinese people that were born in China who illegally immigrated to the United States by purchasing fraudulent documentations which stated that they were blood relatives to Chinese Americans who had citizenships in the United States (Wikipedia).

Chinese immigrants did not face an easy entry. Their answers from interrogations were checked closely for consistency. Chinese immigrants to San Francisco were first detained on ships, then when shipping companies complained about delays, a detention facility was used on the docks, then later Angel Island was used from 1910-1940 ; it became known as the Ellis Island of the West.  A fire in 1940 closed the facilities and the detention center moved to San Francisco.

Examinations dragged on for weeks, months, and even years; some simply returned to China, others committed suicide.

Joy

January 26, 2016 Staff Meeting

Attending: Melissa, Irene, Steven, Rodney, Julia, Becky, Joy

Moderator: Melissa

1.       Review of the Manager’s meeting:

a.       It was mostly training

b.      Michele shared the new mayor, Sylvester Turner’s, message that every department will have to make sacrifices, but what those are have not been determined.

2.       E-mail reminders:

a.       Make sure you finish your trainings, Cyber Security, and Lean Six Sigma.

b.      Make sure you change your e-mail signatures from saying Annise Parker to Sylvester Turner.

c.       If you are contacted by someone with City Council or the Mayor’s office on behalf of the City of Houston let Sue, Melissa, Liz, Michele and especially Mary Sloan Hammond or Dr. Lawson know before responding.  All responses need to go through Mary Sloan Hammond.

3.       5 Minute resource share:

a.       Melissa: to learn more about the states to help answer customer questions watch or read things like.  You can use them for training if you let your supervisor know what you watched and something you learned to help customers with.

                                                               i.      Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road”

                                                             ii.      “How the States Got their Shapes”

4.       Ice Breaker: pick a Lifesaver and share favorites based on the color

a.       Green- favorite book or movie

                                                               i.      Melissa movie: Gone with the Wind

                                                             ii.      Irene movie: I remember Momma

b.      Yellow- life goal

                                                               i.      Rodney: to write a book

                                                             ii.      Julia: after retirement to start a ministry with the elderly

c.       Purple- favorite way to revive yourself during the workday

                                                               i.      Becky: to check up on the cats

                                                             ii.      Joy: have a snack or go outside in the fresh air

d.      Red- one thing you love about your job

                                                               i.      Steven: working with the volunteers

5.       Q&A:

a.       Steven thanked the staff for help with the Volunteer Recognition party yesterday, Especially Julia for the decorations and help with the food.

b.      Julia said that many of the volunteers commented on how much they appreciated the party and how great it was.

Submitted by :IBW

Genealogy Blogs - Professional Development in a Nutshell

Looking to learn more about a specific research interest to help our customers?  Looking to broaden your horizons?  Subscribe to a genealogy blog!  Thomas MacEntee, founder of Geneabloggers.com provides a one place platform to discover this online community  resource listing over 3000 genealogy and family history blogs all over the world. Blogs are listed when they are submitted by the owner of the blog or by one of their readers.

Here you will find the home page and a guide to discovering all the blogs available.  You can search topics to discover blogs of interest.  A quick search for "prison" brings up information in blogs from personal blogs by many people;   Family Tree Magazine announcing record availability; and much more.  

Searching for webinars? Try that as a key word.  Results offer calendars from Dear Myrtle  and other aggregate websites that will give you suggested links to webinars.   

For those of us on Facebook, Geneabloggers also can be found there.  Just "like" that page and you will get an overview of listings for the "blog roll", and other little tidbits of genealogical information.  

Zoom around on the Geneabloggers website and discover plenty of information!

(SK)

Louisiana Parish Marriage Records

For those of you with Louisiana roots, Familysearch.org has begun uploading Louisiana Parish courthouse marriage records onto their database beginning as early as the 1830s to the late 1950s.
I was able to find the marriage licenses of several relatives searching the database.

Currently, the "Louisiana Parish Marriage Records" database is 17% complete and the majority of the Parishes included so far are in Southwest Louisiana and Orleans. You can search the database by the names of the groom and bride. Many of the marriages provide valuable genealogical information such as the names of parents, witnesses and sometimes offer hints to the religious affiliation of the couples.

Happy hunting!!!!

Rodney Sam

Figure 1: courtesy of FamilySearch.org
Marriage of Ermogene JACK to Marie CULARD

 

Source for Webinars

I discovered the Library of Congress has webcasts on their website.

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/index.php

You can either browse by category or use the search function at the top of the page.
Just a few examples of topics are:

• The Long Presence of French & German Immigrants on the Mississippi 
• In Search of a Usable Past: Reconstructing the Jewish History of Homestead, Pa.
• DNA and the Origins of People: The Armenians 
• The Political Implications of Human Genomics
• Hard Times on the U.S.- Mexican Border, 1910-1939
• Breaking the Bonds of People and Land: Native American Removal in the United States and Mexico

Joy