Mapping the Villages & Towns Recorded in the Register of Chinese Immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1949

By phchow on November 3, 2010

The mapping of geographic names recorded in the head tax database was launched in the fall of 2008 as one of the “Asian Library’s Partnerships with Communities’ Program Series”. It took 20 rounds of community-based meetings with Taishanese/Zhongshanese-speaking participants to match the towns and villages of origin reported by 90% of the immigrants with the original geographical names in Chinese scripts. With the findings, community members interested in their genealogy, UBC students and indeed scholars from all over the world are able to work toward an international research network for reporting the roots of emigrants from Guangdong, China from 1885-1947, during which head tax was levied on incoming ethnic Chinese. (more)

Permalink |

One response to “Mapping the Villages & Towns Recorded in the Register of Chinese Immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1949”

doris chow
December 28, 2010 at 4:32 am | Permalink | Reply

this is an amazing project and so appreciative of this work and dedication. my mother is a 3rd generation chinese-canadian and her grandfather came to canada to build railroads. she grew up in brockville, ontario and the family owned a restaurant there. her mom and children were forced to return to their village in taishan, china during the depression given the financial situation. my uncles were fortunate enough to return to get their college education in the early 1940’s at the university of washington and university of tennessee. the girls were married and remained in china during the war.

my uncles were able to return and raise their families in toronto. With my first cousins and their children, we are up to five generations in canada.

but my mom and father’s families have deep taishan roots and your work is so important. in fact, my daughter is in kunming on a fulbright grant to research and record the experiences of local people with the american troops/flying tigers during world war II. my father served in the US airforce/army in the division that was composed of mainly chinese-american men. And those men were mainly from taishan,

we will be visiting china for the first time and would love to be able to find our villages in taishan. any pointers to find our roots would be appreciated.

thank you for doing this incredible work.