Chinese immigrants to Canada – Registers of Chinese Immigration to Canada, 1885–1949

Marisa Louie Lee shared this post on Grant Din’s forum chineseamericanfamilyhistory link that might be useful to members of BACGG. Here is her repost:

Hi all,
For those of you interested in Chinese Canadian immigration, Grant asked me to share about the Registers of Chinese Immigration to Canada, 1885–1949. These are held by Library Archives Canada and document “all immigrants of Chinese origin arriving in Canada between 1885 and 1949.”
You may have heard that these are being newly indexed on FamilySearch, but they were previously indexed as part of a project from the University of British Columbia, and the index is hosted at Library Archives Canada
The index data is also available as a spreadsheet, which has the amazing addition of analysis and “mapping” of the place of birth fields in the register. What resulted is being able to search the spreadsheet by a village name in Chinese characters for two of the counties in Guangdong Province, the place of origin for many pre-WWII Chinese immigrants. 
As an example, I searched my great-grandfather’s village and found a handful of immigrants to Canada who also came from his village. Interestingly, their 雷 surname was primarily Romanized as LOY rather than my LOUIE.
Have you found any of your Chinese Canadian relatives or ancestors in the registers? Feel free to share!

Marisa

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