About Taishan Genealogy

Taishan Genealogy puts the genealogies of Taishan's villages online. Whether you are in Taicheng, Guangzhou or Hong Kong, in New York or Vancouver, you can open it on your phone, find your village and your ancestors, and help your scattered relatives carry the family record forward. Taishan Genealogy is a not-for-profit genealogy platform, and creating a genealogy here is completely free; reading is free too, and needs no account.

Taishan: one Taishan at home, another overseas

Taishan lies in the south-west of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, facing the South China Sea, and is part of Jiangmen today. It was called Sunning (Xinning) until 1914. It is divided into the Taicheng subdistrict and sixteen towns, with some three hundred administrative villages and communities and more than 3,600 natural villages. Taishan people have always lived in clans: many villages are home to a single surname, some to a few, and a village has its ancestral hall and a clan its genealogy.

Taishan is known in China as the "First Home of Overseas Chinese". From the mid-nineteenth century its people left in wave after wave: to the California gold fields, to build the transcontinental railroad, and later across the United States, Canada, South-East Asia, Latin America and Australia. In the early Chinatowns of North America, the language on the street was Taishanese. Today more than a million people of Taishan descent live overseas and in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, hence the saying "one Taishan at home, another overseas".

Living in the city, rooted in the village

Emigrants are not the only ones who left. Over recent decades far more people have moved out of the villages, to Taicheng, Jiangmen, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Foshan, to Hong Kong and Macau, to study, to work and to settle. The young leave one by one and the old stay behind; many villages are quiet for most of the year and only come alive at Qingming, Chongyang and New Year.

The people have left, but the genealogy is still in the village:

• The book is hard to see. A genealogy is usually kept in the ancestral hall or in an elder's house. Getting home is hard enough for those who moved away; getting a look at the book is harder.
• The young no longer know where they come from. Many children raised in the city or overseas speak no Taishanese, cannot read a book printed in vertical traditional characters, and cannot say which village their family is from.
• Keeping it up gets harder. With the family spread far apart, it rarely gathers. New babies, new wives and married daughters go unrecorded, and the genealogy stops.

The roots are in the village, the family is in the cities and abroad. Putting the genealogy online puts the village's book in every relative's phone.

What going online gives a family

• Read it from anywhere. Open the link and the genealogy is there: look people up by name or courtesy name, follow the line from the founding ancestor down to you, unfold the family chart generation by generation. Simplified and traditional characters both work, and where the book has been scanned you can check entries against its pages. No account and no trip home needed.
• A lead for those searching from abroad. Many overseas descendants have only a village name, or an old romanised spelling from a letter, a remittance slip or an immigration file. The Villages directory lists the administrative and natural villages of every Taishan town and finds them by name, by pinyin or by the spelling of the 1963 village index. Search by surname to see which villages a family name lives in, and go from the village to its genealogy.
• The whole family, wherever it lives, keeps it up. The genealogy's administrator sends its access code to the family's WeChat group, and relatives in the city or abroad can add new babies and spouses and correct mistakes, each branch filling in its own. The administrator can also let code holders submit without an account; what they send takes effect as the genealogy's review settings say, by default only once the administrator approves it.
• The book as it was, corrections beside it. What was copied from the book is not altered; a correction is recorded next to it, the page says what the book has, and every entry carries its page number in the book.
• Compile the new edition online. A family compiling a new edition of its genealogy can also use the online genealogy to add the names of family members with ease, then use the PDF typesetting here to download a print-ready file and print it as a book.
• Print it whenever you like. Every genealogy can be made into a PDF in three layouts (traditional vertical, indented, index) with ten covers, the whole book or just your own branch: one to take home at Qingming, one to post to relatives abroad.
• Three languages. The site works in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English, so a descendant who reads only English can use it too. Names are always shown as the book writes them.

An open platform

• One village, one surname, one genealogy. Taishan genealogies are mostly compiled by village, or by a branch within a village, so here a genealogy is a village and a surname. Each stands alone and is run by its own administrators.
• Anyone can start one. Your village's genealogy is not online yet? Start a genealogy walks you through it in four steps; then send the access code to the family WeChat group and invite your relatives in.
• Somebody checks. By default a genealogy's administrators review the family's changes; they decide which kinds may apply at once, and every change is recorded.
• Recent generations stay private. The names of recent members (those with fewer than four generations recorded below them) are not shown to the public; only the genealogy's administrators, verified relatives and those who came in with the access code see them. See the Privacy Policy.

Where to begin