Community Announcements and Events

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

Gold Coast Casio, Las Vegas, NV

February 2 (Sunday check-in) to February 8 (Thursday Checkout), 2024

Conference Dates: February 5 through February 7, 2024

Conference flyer, registration form and local restaurants

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8kqq67lv4ffe971/AABPFQHrFqmaDui7tOVjmt3sa?dl=0

For more information: henry.tom@cox.net

This is a 3-day workshop, with presentations in the morning, and Round-Table discussions between attendees & experts, and a Tutorial on Documenting Genealogy Research Wednesday afternoon.

American Born Chinese (ABCs) seniors have been doing the research, but, as this generation is becoming older, there is a realistic need to document this research as part of their family history for their family & descendants.  The tutorial, “Documenting Your Family History Made Easy”, covers the development of generic templates where specific content modules can be inserted and shared across Word and PowerPoint software.

Here are some of things you will learn at the roundtables:

• Finding your ancestral village
• Brief Chinese to English translations
• OCR processing & conversion of PDF versions of your Chinese genealogy books into searchable PDF documents by computer – which is a tremendous aid in searching the massive genealogy lineages and finding & tracing / linking consecutive generations of your ancestors, Dr. Mel Thatcher & Henry Tom will be available to assist in converting your PDFs of your genealogy books into searchable PDFs.  Another valuable aspect of this OCR processing is allowing you to highlight narrative texts about your individual ancestors found in your genealogy book, and to cut & paste these Chinese annotations & narratives into any of a number of online Chinese to English translators.

Session speakers and topics will be updated as we get closer to the conference.

If you want to enjoy the Chinese New Year celebrations in Las Vegas – consider coming 1 or 2 days before the workshop, just do so by selecting the arrival & departure dates when you book your room.  

The 4-day hotel workshop package by itself is $331 and is separate from the workshop registration fee of $375.

FREE

Saturday, January 20, 2024. 11AM – 1PM

El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Ave, El Cerrito

What You Will Learn

•Key resources, best practices, and tips on how to create your own multimedia family legacy.

•“How to” create an oral history using artificial intelligence, scan and restore photos, free/cost effective multimedia conversion resources.

•Demonstrate a digital family history book.

Abstract

How To Digitize & Document Your Family History 
This session takes you into the physical and virtual world on how to build a multimedia family library. We will demonstrate and teach “how to” create an oral history using artificial intelligence, scan and restore photos, reveal free/cost effective multimedia conversion resources, and demonstrate a digital family history book. You will walk away knowing key resources, best practices, and tips on how to create your own family legacy.       

About The Speaker: Ron Chan

Ron has lectured on the principals of documenting family history at nine consecutive Genealogy Workshops, presenting and teaching how to create novel and compelling ways to bring family history to life. He is Founder and Executive Director of the Bay Area Chinese Genealogy Group, whose mission is to share, educate and tell the story and struggles of the past, so future generations may know their roots.      

On Saturday, April 23@10:00 a.m. PDT, we are honored to host Ambassador Elena Wachong (Costa Rica), who will provide a talk focused on the global barriers to finding Chinese diaspora family roots for non-Chinese speakers.  Ambassador Wachong will be joined by discussant, Dr. Lai Sai Acon (University of Costa Rica).  Dr. Judith Rubenstein (Granite Hills Press) will offer a special introduction, and Dr. Bob Stein will moderate.  Please register to attend@https://SDSU.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwoce2upj8oEtMQaSjpbygDJYMXPvpaJP9U On Saturday, May 7@10 a.m. PDT, we are excited to welcome Tiffany Chin, two-time bronze medalist at the World Figure Skating Championship.  Tiffany will be accompanied by San Diego City Council Director of Communications, Chris Chan, who will moderate the conversation.  Please register to attend@https://sdsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsfu6ppzgrEtMWAXr_E0IK82eFiwg5LoI0  On Saturday, May 21@10:00 a.m. PDT, we will be pleased to welcome Dr. Yong Ming Li, a Licensed Physician and Acupuncturist, Herbalist, board-certified Pathologist and Dermatopathologist, who has been practicing, teaching and doing research on traditional Chinese medicine for more than 25 years.  In anticipation of the May 27th opening of our exhibition, ACUPUNCTURE – 50 YEARS IN THE UNITED STATES, Dr. Li will speak on the domestic history of the practice, recalling stories in relation to the effort to make this healing art legally supported in different states.  You may register to attend @https://SDSU.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvduioqTstHNQagILMiTsp5EAbvZTMRitF.  The San Diego Chinese Historical Museum is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizationTax ID # 33-0179740

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.

Another cross post from Trish Hackett Nicola, who wrote:

There is an article from the New Yorker online. 28 Jan 2022 on legers with photos and biographical information of Chinese living in Downieville, CA about 1890-1930.

“The Dark Purpose Behind a Town Constable’s Journal” by Michael Luo ^{The Article link}

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.

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

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.

Watch the recorded videos of the September 30, 2021 Chinese American WWII Veterans Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Watch the presentation of the National Chinese American WWII Veterans Congressional Gold Medal Presentation on Facebook by clicking the button below. Note there is a 28 minute delay at the beginning of the video.

When the title page appears click the area between WWII and Veterans to start the video.

At the bottom of the video move the slider to 28:55.

Watch the Gala speaking program on Facebook by clicking the button below.

Share the events with your friends and family. Don’t forget to tag @AARPAAPI when sharing.

Sponsored By:

The Chinese American WWII Veterans Recognition Project is a program of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (C.A.C.A.), a 501(c)8, and the National Chinese American Citizens Alliance Community Involvement Fund, a 501(c)3. Together we are spearheading a national campaign to identify, honor and recognize the efforts and accomplishments of all Chinese Americans who served in the United States Armed Services in World War II. For more information contact cgminfo@caww2.org.

VENG Group | C.A.C.A. C.I.F., Washington, DC 20035

In mid-July, a member of the Bay Area Chinese Genealogy Group (BACGG) contacted Dr. Jason Lau to make arrangements for a docent tour of China Camp State Park.  Half of the eight were first time visitors. Martin Lowenstein, FOCC executive director, welcomed the group at the café. The slightly breezy August afternoon visit included a tour of the former Chinese fishing village by Ed Lai. His presentation included the history of Miwok, Spanish, and Chinese inhabitants. His tour began with a walk out on the pier to see the replica of a Chinese fishing junk, museum, and shrimp processing equipment. Back at the cafe, volunteer, Ernie Stanton, shared details about the Quans, the last family to run the café, and pointed out photos from when the village was used as a set for a John Wayne film, Blood Alley.

Naturalist, Jerry Coe, led the group on a nature hike on the Turtle Back Loop. He discussed the history of the pre-colonial Miwok who lived in harmony with the land. Jerry patiently helped members of the group learn to identify different flora. They all tasted pickle weed, a source of salt, from the marshland.

Members of the group joined FOCC and also made donations. An article about China Camp State Park will be posted on the BACGG website later this month.

“China Camp State Park is a 1,514-acre park nestled along the shoreline of San Pablo Bay in San Rafael, California. The park boasts panoramic views, lush oak woodlands, and over 100 acres of protected tidal salt marsh. Whether you’re a hiker or mountain biker, a history buff, or a beach lover, you’ll have an unforgettable day at China Camp.

Visit China Camp’s historic shrimping village and beach area. The village is the perfect place to bring friends and family for a fun day trip. Visit the museum to learn more about China Camp’s fascinating history. Stop by the historic cafe on weekends for snacks and cold drinks. The site features first-come, first-served picnic areas with tables, drinking water, bathrooms, and an outdoor shower.

Learn more about the Chinese shrimp fishing in San Francisco Bay: watch a video by Chinese Whispers: Bay Chronicles.

http://chinese-whispers.org/bay-chronicles/

Friends of China Camp (FOCC) is the community-based nonprofit organization that keeps China Camp State Park open. Since 2012, FOCC has been the sole operator and manager of the park. The organization, largely run by volunteers, is responsible for covering all expenses related to keeping the park open. Find out how you can become a member, and help keep China Camp open and thriving for all.

Friends of China Camp (FOCC) is committed to keeping China Camp State Park open and thriving for our community. To learn more about China Camp, plan a day trip, or camping trip visit the FOCC website at https://friendsofchinacamp.org

https://whttps://www.rootstech.org/rootstech-connect-2021-registration?lang=engww.rootstech.org/?lang=eng

Join the world’s largest family celebration for free to unlock your family’s history and learn how to preserve the stories of your life.

25 – 27 FEBRUARY, 2021

Introducing RootsTech Connect: A Free Online Conference Experience

For the first time ever, the world’s largest family celebration event will be entirely virtual and completely free. Get ready to celebrate shared connections with people from around the world. Connect with friends, your family, your past, and your heritage and homelands—all from the comfort of your home and in your browser.

Celebrity Keynote Speakers

Keynotes are a huge part of RootsTech events. They deliver messages of inspiration and hope. Stay tuned for the full lineup of keynote speakers to be announced soon.

Virtual Marketplace

The virtual Marketplace will be the perfect place to see the latest innovations, interact with companies from around the world, and find answers and resources to aid you in your work. Plus, get real-time help via video or live chat!

Cultural Activities

Celebrate the world’s cultures with activities such as homeland cooking demonstrations, yoga, and music from around the world. These experiences will be available throughout the online event and on demand.

Connect with Family from Anywhere

Finding cousins and interacting with other attendees is an important part of the RootsTech model. Enjoy exclusive opportunities to chat with other attendees through various messaging boards, social media interactions, and video chats.