Author: Ron Chan

BACGG Zoom Event: Thursday, September 14, 2023 @ 6:30 PST – 8:00PST

This session is over, and is posted on Youtube: Click Here

Have questions about tongs or associations? Please email questions in advance by September 7, 2023, to bacgg.gail@gmail.com and bacgg.jeannie@gmail.com

George Chin, (Founder of Chinatown History & Culture Association) will provide a personal overview of SF’s Organized Associations and will discuss the roles of associations in the Community & Social Services.

Additionally, Ding Lee, Director of Lee’s Family Association, Ning Yung, Bing Kong Tong, Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and Chinatown History & Culture Association, will share his experience about associations and help answer questions.

Chinese Tongs, or organized associations, have served five generations of Chinese Americans for over 175 years. They have earned respect of their contributions to the Chinese American community, but they also face multiple challenges and limitations. Learn about Chinese Family Tongs / Associations, and how they impacted your ancestors and may impact you today:

• Presentation of History, Culture & Education
• Genealogy Research: Tongs have maintained membership and payment records for many years. This information can be valuable for people who are conducting genealogy research.
• Challenges and limitations of Tongs
• Where do Tong’s get respect?

SAVE THE DATE FOR SESSIONS AT THE OAKLAND FAMILYSEARCH CENTER

October 19, 2023, Thursday – Ron Chan – Digitze and Document Your Family History

November 2023, Leona Lau – Our Moms, Chinese War Brides – Their Stories From War Time China to Post War USA. Also NARA Archives Workshop – Research for War Bride documents

Contact: sarah@walkingcinema.org

The California Migration Museum is a new initiative that plans to build an immersive experience bringing together stories across California’s migration history. We are currently working on a virtual, augmented reality-enhanced historical walking tour of SF Chinatown that will pivot around the story of the 1906 earthquake and its aftermath. We’re looking for:

1. Descendants who can trace their ancestors back to those days, especially if their ancestors were involved with the reconstruction of Chinatown.
2. We’re also looking for descendants who grew up with a mother or grandmother who lived through the earthquake.

Presented by the California Historical Society: January 28, 2022 to June 25, 2022

More information here

THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 678 MISSION STREET, SAN FRANCISCO CA, 94105 Open Thursday – Saturday, 12:00pm – 5:30pm

In its new exhibition Chinese Pioneers: Power and Politics in Exclusion Era Photographs, the California Historical Society explores the Chinese immigrant experience during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The exhibition sheds light on the history of Sinophobia and resonates with broader questions about immigration, citizenship, and border control currently being debated.

In the United States during the Exclusion Era years, depictions of Chinese people ranged from deeply derogatory to highly exoticized. The Chinese Pioneers exhibition examines the visual record of how mainstream culture influenced, aligned with, and/or diverged from politics and state actions.

Photography played a potent role in Chinese people’s interactions with the dominant culture and in the government’s fledgling systems of registration, identification, and surveillance. Chinese Pioneers presents photographs—both studio photography and fine-art photos—alongside illustrated newspapers, paintings, and ephemera from the California Historical Society’s collections.

The exhibition is drawn exclusively from the California Historical Society’s deep collections of topical material. On view are rare items, such as one of the earliest known records of Chinese immigration to California, certificates of residence for Chinese laborers (1894–1897), and a one-of-a-kind photo album compiled by a Sierra County justice of the peace who was tracking Chinese residents. Less rare but equally powerful items in the collection include formal portraits of Chinese men and women taken in photographic studios, some operated by Chinese photographers; illustrated newspapers; a painting of a Chinese woman; photographs of Chinese workers; and works by art photographers Arnold Genthe and Laura Adams Armer.

The richness of these collections presents a compelling visual history that dovetails with the social, political, and judicial disenfranchisement of Chinese Californians, as well as moments of Chinese agency and resilience.

Below provided by: Chinese Historical Society of America

As we all continue to navigate the challenges surrounding the health and safety circumstances currently affecting our community, the nation, and the world at large, CHSA has respectfully delayed the opening of our upcoming We Are Bruce Lee exhibition. Amid these ever-changing times, know that the health and comfort of our community is of the utmost priority and importance to CHSA, and we are carefully monitoring and adapting to the relevant guidelines in order to determine a new exact grand opening date.

We will get there. 

As Bruce himself said, “Be Water, My Friend.” We are looking forward to sharing with you We Are Bruce Lee in early 2022.

Please stay tuned for more information as we announce updates to the exhibition and other programming and content. To learn more about or support this exhibition, check out We Are Bruce Lee and follow CHSA.

In the meantime, pre-sale tickets will be made available soon, with CHSA members receiving first priority. For more information on how to become a member, to help sustain our museum’s work, please visit CHSA.org.

From Grant Din, grant@tonaidin.net

I just got this from fellow genealogist Renee Carl last week. “NARA just dropped a press release announcing that the 1950 Census will be powered with an AI/ML/OCR name search.” Renee was involved in a beta test and was seriously impressed with this Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Optical Character Recognition technology. I encourage you to read the NARA release she links to. It sounds like this technology will allow you to search for names right from the time the census is released on April 1, 2022, but in case you can’t find who you are looking for, there are actually other ways.

When the 1940 census results were released in 2012, the volunteers at Family Search,  the paid indexers at Ancestry and other people took about 4-6 months to index the records, so this technology could save us many months of waiting. In case you can’t find your family through this name search right away, you can also search through Enumeration Districts (E.D.s), which are smaller segments of a community and not too difficult to look at block by block.

There are ways to figure out ahead of time which E.D.s your family members may have lived in so you can look in them as soon as the census is released on April 1. I just attended a webinar by Thomas MacEntee and he had two handouts he encouraged us to share (please attribute them to him if you pass them along). One is full of great information and links (ignore where he says the 2022 release date is two years away!) and the other is a spreadsheet you can use to input your family’s (or whomever you are researching) information in an organized fashion, which he describes in the informational handout.
If you know or can figure out where the person you’re researching lived (there are many directories online, or you can use correspondence or ask someone who was alive then), you can use an amazing tool developed by Steve Morse (developer of the Intel 8086 chip!). Go here:https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html and click on 1950 in the pull-down menu at the top of the page. Then pull down the appropriate information to find out which enumeration districts correspond with the address you’re looking for.

It also works for rural areas. For example, a lot of people have roots in the Sacramento River Delta – towns like Isleton, Walnut Grove, Locke, Courtland, etc. You can select Sacramento County, then under city, choose “Other.” I typed in “Courtland,” and got 34-119, which includes ” GEORGIANA JUDICIAL TOWNSHIP (TRACT SC-136) BOUNDED BY (N) COUNTY LINE, JUDICIAL TOWNSHIP LINE; (E) JUDICIAL TOWNSHIP LINE; (S) LAUREL LN; (W) SACRAMENTO RIVER, COUNTY LINE, AND SHOULD CONTAIN LAMBERT, VORDEN, COURTLAND.”

That’s just one example. This information should help you find family members when the 1950 census is released on April 1, 2022! Please post if you have other ideas or if I have some incorrect information.