Our June update brings you a trove of new records and resources to level up your Chinese family history research. Read on to discover:
- 📖 2.8 million newly added records of Chinese American ancestors
- 🌐 New OCR feature to decode your Chinese photos and documents
- 🕵🏻♀️ New webinar series to get live support from the My China Roots team!
📖 New Historical Collections
As of June 2024, we have published ⭐️ 2.8 million records ⭐️ of Chinese American ancestors, expanding the My China Roots Database to a total of 5.3 million records.
Search the historical collections below to uncover historical traces of Chinese American ancestors!
Social Security Records 🗃️
Numerical Identification Files (NUMIDENT) were used by government officials to track income earnings and determine social security benefits. Sourced from applications, deaths, and claims, NUMIDENT entries may contain information like a social security number, parents’ names, birth place and date, death date, citizenship, and race.
Now Available
- Numerical Identification Files (NUMIDENT), 1900-2007 (1,454,182 records)
Vital Records 💒
Birth, Marriage, and Death indexes were compiled by state officials to keep track of birth, marriage, and death certificates. If you find a record of interest in an index, you could apply for a copy of the original certificate directly with the institution that created the index. For more information, consult the source page.
Now Available
Marriage Records
- New York City Marriage Index, 1950-1995 (364,104 records)
- Connecticut Marriage Index, 1897-2017 (210,106 records)
Death Records
- New York City Death Index, 1880-1971 (185,605 records)
- Missouri Death Index, 1968-2022 (111,284 records)
- Connecticut Death Index, 1917-2017 (68,096 records)
- New Jersey Death Index, 2000-2017 (34,396 records)
- Alameda County, California: County Death Records, 1889-1901 (100 records)
Birth Records
- Missouri Birth Index, 1910-2022 (311,691 records)
Military Records 🎖️
We’re excited to publish our first military collection, recognizing the contributions of Chinese American veterans in World War II. In fact, 40% of them served even though they were not U.S. citizens, since the Chinese Exclusion Act denied citizenship to people of Chinese descent. It wasn’t until the law’s repeal in 1943 that Chinese veterans were finally eligible for naturalization.
Now Available
- USA Army Enlistment Records, 1938-1946 (26,754 records)
🌐 New Feature: Bilingual Text Extraction ᴮᴱᵀᴬ
With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, you can now automatically transcribe any photos and documents containing text in English and Chinese.
Use this feature to extract and translate Chinese characters in your family history records, without needing to read or type Chinese!
Just upload a file to your Media Library and click Extract Text to give it a try.
🌳 Plus more family tree optimizations:
- New keyboard shortcuts added for desktop (see top-left corner Shortcuts button)
- Mobile menus are now much easier to use
- Dozens of bug fixes, performance, and quality-of-life improvements
🕵🏻♀️ New Webinar Series: “Getting Started with My China Roots”
Registration is now open for the first of our new monthly webinar series to help you jumpstart and make new discoveries in your Chinese family history research.
During these live sessions, founder Huihan Lie and veteran genealogist Clotilde Yap will be available on Zoom to answer any of your questions and show you:
- how to build your (Chinese) family tree
- how to search records of your Chinese immigrant ancestors
- how to find your Chinese family tree book (zupu/jiapu)
To make the most of the workshop, we encourage you to create your FREE family tree on My China Roots in advance. All information uploaded to your tree will remain fully private to you and will not be visible to any other users.
Sign up below, and invite your friends and family to join you!
🗓️ July 16, 2024
⏰ 11:00 am PDT
🔗 Register for free
🔔 To sign up for upcoming webinars:
Login or register for free, go to Account profile, and check the box for Events and Workshops under Email Notification Settings. We’ll email you the registration link each month!
Questions, feedback, or bug reports?
Login and share your thoughts or email feedback@mychinaroots.com. We’re all ears to how we can improve and create better resources to support your family history journey.
Be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter and follow @mychinaroots on social media to stay updated on new features all year round!
