Genealogy
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Genealogy sites:
Genealogy
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Genealogy sites:
Maps
Outside China, there are approximately 35 million overseas Chinese living in more than 90 countries, with over 3 million Chinese and their descendants originating from Guangdong province, China - specifically from two major county concentrations: Sam Yap ( three county) and Sze Yap (four county). They are adjoining county clusters, located very close to Guangzhou ( Canton ), the capital of Guangdong province in southeastern China.
Until around 1965, it has been estimated that 95 % of the Chinese in North America came from the Sam Yap / Sze Yap region – with over 50% of the people coming from just one county - Taishan county. Taicheng is the principal city of Taishan county. This chain migration pattern represented a point-to-point movement of Chinese, mostly men, from villages within a small area in China to various Chinatowns overseas – resulting from Chinese sending remittances to support families in China with the eventual re-unification of these families overseas.
Ancestral Village
Thus, with the origin of so many Chinese from a such a small area, finding the ancestral village in Taishan county should not be too hard. But, it has also been estimated that there are between eight to ten thousand villages and hamlets in Taishan county alone. There have been changes in the names of villages and areas. Changes in area boundaries, without moving villages at all, may locate the villages in areas with different names. Consequently, it can be a frustrating experience in trying to locate ancestral villages. To further complicate matters, detailed large scale map coverage of the region is not available because the Chinese government restricts their access.
Usually, the best maps available are in Chinese. The tourist / road maps that are in both English / Chinese are rather general and do not show much detail or village locations / names. It is difficult to find detailed maps that show village locations with village names in English or Chinese, but, rarely in both English and Chinese.
Multiple spellings, resulting from various romanizations, of village names cause additional complexity, for example "Toishan" and "Taishan" are slightly different romanizations for the same area. Romanizations are intended to facilitate the pronunciation of Chinese characters, however, since there are multiple romanization systems, it becomes quite perplexing and it is the Chinese characters that have to ultimately clarify the confusion of the associated Western romanizations.
Multiple names for the same place, resulting from historic changes, is yet another twist. For example, Taishan county has also been known as "Sunning" county.
The use of gazetteers, lists of placenames, is very useful in distinguishing a place because of multiple names and/or various spellings for the placename - since the associated geographic coordinates can uniquely identify a place. "Taishan" is also used as the same place name for different geographic entities such as: village, city, district, and county.
Then, there are also the differences between the traditional and simplified Chinese character sets.