For Thursday’s release, the company digitized over half a million records going back to the mid-1800s, when the discovery of gold in California and British Columbia attracted immigrants from around the world, including many from China. As competition grew, anti-Chinese sentiment increased. Laws such as the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 were enacted to block further immigration.
The searchable database includes official records, photographs and details about family relationships that could help descendants learn more about their ancestors’ experiences. Documents include ship passenger manifests, applications for admission, immigration case files and registers of Chinese laborers returning to North America.
“My family was among those restricted from immigrating by the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,” Ancestry president and CEO Deb Liu wrote in an email. “My grandparents were not eligible to immigrate to the U.S. … As an American of Chinese descent, I am grateful for everything America has meant to my family, but I also know that there was a time when we were blocked from building a life here.”
As different groups jockeyed in the race to make fortunes, Chinese immigrants were an easy target, said Linda Yip, an expert in Chinese genealogy who is working with Ancestry on the project. “We are physically different and culturally quite different,” Yip said. For example, Chinese gold miners often worked collectively and shared profits, which increased their success factor but also irked other miners, she said.
In 1943, Congress repealed all exclusion acts. Liu’s parents came to the United States after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which abolished restrictions on citizenship, though it maintained a quota.
“These records serve as a sobering reminder of the discrimination and inequities faced by Chinese people living in, and immigrating to, the U.S. and Canada during this time,” Liu said.
Yip grew up in Vancouver, B.C., in a home that was silent about what her family had gone through. “My parents just couldn’t talk about it,” she said. When she was 11, “I was snooping around my dad’s desk and found this document.”
It was a yellow card with a photograph of her father at age 2, issued in 1924, which diminished his legal rights in Canada. “It replaced my father’s native-born status with that of an immigrant, and he had to carry it with him as identification.”
The change in status prevented him from attending university, and he spent his life doing itinerant work for little pay, Yip said. It was also a lifelong source of shame for him, something he hadn’t shared with his daughter.
“We didn’t know our stories,” she said.
The archive, she said, “will allow people to research their own family, their own story, and discover, like I did … ‘Holy cow, they endured all that to give me the life that I live now.’”
The exclusion era also separated families. Typically, men would come to North America first as laborers, save money and then bring their families over. The accessibility of old records may allow families to connect with relatives by the imposition of immigration restrictions.
Research on Chinese people in the United States and Canada is particularly challenging for genealogists, Yip said, because they were not always listed by name in common records such as newspapers or directories.
“Often, people were mentioned by race,” she said. For instance, instead of naming the victim of a crime, a newspaper might say, “Chinaman robbed.” A city directory or census might also just indicate “Chinese” rather than list people’s names, she said.
This Saturday marks 100 years since the Chinese Immigration Act passed in Canada, barring Chinese people from immigrating for the next 24 years. A new Chinese Canadian Museum will open Friday in Vancouver, in Yip’s family home.
In collaboration with the Chinese American Museum in Washington, D.C., Ancestry will host an online panel discussion with experts on the exclusion era on Tuesday, July 18, at 6 p.m. Eastern time.