UC Irvine Libraries have added a new subscription to My China Roots, an online platform gathering millions of historical records of the Chinese diaspora, from North America to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.

The My China Roots platform includes immigration lists, exclusion files, family trees, vital indexes, community files, burial and business records, and more. The database is unique in that it offers Chinese-specific sources, a bilingual approach to indexing, and a suite of translation tools. Although the database’s primary use is family history research, it will be of interest to any students and scholars of Chinese culture and kinship, diaspora, migration, ethnic, or Asian American studies.

Database Content and Features

My China Roots consist of a combination of overseas and mainland Chinese collections:

• Overseas Chinese collections include 7+ million records covering 5+ million individuals 
• Mainland Chinese collections include 200+ million individuals
• Chinese surname database includes 400+ surnames and 9,400 recorded spelling variants
• Ancestral village database includes 31 regions of China and 700,000 place names

The Overseas Chinese collections contain materials in English and Chinese, including Census records, immigration and travel records, US Chinese Exclusion Act case files and records, and Chinese association materials.

To compile the mainland Chinese collections, My China Roots and its partner organizations digitized and made searchable 1,000 Chinese family tree books (or Zupus), which are traditional Chinese kinship books compiled by clans.

Site features allow users to filter and search by name, time period, region, and keyword as well as birth, death, and arrival dates. Compilation articles also offer summaries of Chinese region and village information. Additional research tools include indexed and cross-referenced genealogies, full-page language translations, Chinese character extraction and translation from images, and direct links to US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records.

According to My China Roots’ Global Collections Manager Clotilde Yap, the platform brings together a variety of resources that would otherwise be scattered in different places.

“The long-term vision and mission of My China Roots is to preserve the histories and stories of Chinese communities around the world,” she said.

How to Access

UC Irvine Libraries’ one-year subscription to My China Roots is available to the entire UC Irvine community. Users connecting on campus via a campus device or via UC Irvine WiFi will be automatically logged into the site. To access the database from off campus, users with a current account will be required to connect via the UC Irvine virtual private network (VPN) and be promoted to login via their UCInetID.