True story: My Chinese daughter-in-law asked her father, who was born in China and immigrated to Vancouver, B.C. as a young man, to write the family genealogy. He did. He wrote it in Chinese. And she cannot read Chinese. But she treasurers it nonetheless.
Recently in Washington, a bill was passed to honor Americans of Chinese descent in January. The bill designates January as Chinese Descent History Month. This was planned to honor Americans of Chinese descent and their contributions to Washington state. Does your Society have something planned to honor those of Chinese ancestry in your community?
The FamilySearch Library (formerly Family History Library) in Salt Lake City, has been preserving records of Chinese families since the 1980s and is currently houses the largest collection of such records in the world. If you (like me) have a Chinese ancestor or relative, the FamilySearch Library is THE place for you to start digging into their history. (After talking to them, of course!
But I recently (April 2023) read a post by Huang Wei on the Voices & Opinion blog stating that the Shanghai Library (Shanghai, China) “is home to arguably the world’s top collection of Chinese genealogies, including more than 300,000 volumes of nearly 40,000 different genealogies, totaling 456 surnames.”
A Chinese genealogy is a historical document that records (1) the lineage of a blood line descended from a single ancestor, (2) the blood relationship between family members, and (3) a family’s assets and customs. Sadly, one thing they do not typically include are records pertaining to female members of the family.
If you’d enjoy reading Huang Wei’s entire post, click to https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012694
National Archives at Seattle has 50,000 Chinese Exclusion Act case files of Chinese traveling between China and the U.S. and Chinese traveling to from the U.S. to China and other countries. The records at the Seattle facility include entries and departures from Seattle, Sumas, and Port Townsend, Washington; and Portland, Oregon.
The files do not give a complete biography but may have information and photos that cannot be found anywhere else. The files usually list other family members and often have interrogations and/or affidavits from friends, neighbors, or business associates.
To see summaries of the files go to https://chineseexclusionfiles.com/
In reviewing the Pioneer Pursuit genealogies sent in, I ran across many men of Chinese heritage in the records that were working in what is now Washington State making them pioneers before statehood. I hope individual genealogists will work on the genealogies for these men. Being originally from California, I knew California and Nevada had many individuals from China that settled and many records exist for them but did not know that many also came to Washington working in the fur trade until this past year. Pendleton, Oregon also had a sizable population of men from China.
There were a lot of Chinese along the Columbia upstream of Chelan looking for gold.