 Welcome to the last session of the National Archives Virtual Genealogy Fair. The title of this talk is, Oh, the Stories They Tell, Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files at the National Archives and Records Administration. Originally, Susan Karen was scheduled to give this talk, but she cannot be with us today. Marissa Louie has graciously agreed to step in and give the presentation. Although the search for a Chinese Exclusion Act case file may be difficult and challenging, the rewards can be great as these files may contain a treasure trove of information for the family and social historian. While limited to a specific ethnic group, the richness of the records will have everyone scrambling to find a reason to use them. Marissa Louie is going to give the talk, and at the end of her talk, she will be answering questions. You can go ahead and send those in at any time on your stream and Twitter. And again, if she doesn't get to all of the questions, you can contact us at inqire.gov. Marissa Louie has been an archivist at the National Archives in San Francisco, which is really in San Bruno, California, and she's been there since September 2009. She primarily works with Asian American genealogists and family historians interested in case files created by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and this is record group 85. Marissa holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a past participant in an American Studies and Chinese American Cultural Heritage program, and that was entitled, In Search of Roots. Thank you for joining us, Marissa, and we will now turn the program over to you. I'm honored to be able to speak to folks across the nation about our Chinese Exclusion Act records. I'm waiting for the slide to be queued up on Ustream, but to start talking, the Chinese Exclusion Act case files are truly unique records for genealogists. They can be challenging to use as the files at some National Archives facilities are only partially indexed, and even those indexes that do exist may not yet be searchable online. These challenges are compounded by the complexity of Chinese names and naming practices by privacy restrictions that govern access to the case files and by the Chinese immigrants themselves who may have used paper names or come under false identities. Regardless of these challenges, these case files are a rich and rewarding source of information not just for genealogists, but also for social historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and many others. It's simply a question of finding who you're looking for. Today's presentation will provide some background information about the Chinese Exclusion Act case files. We'll look at some documents that may be found in them and then give you all as researchers some tips about how to search for files in our holdings. Next slide, please. As with any records at the National Archives, you'll need to know why and when they were created in order to decide whether they're relevant to the family history that you are researching. Now the Chinese Exclusion Act case files are pretty aptly named. They deal with people who are of Chinese ancestry who entered the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Periods, and that's between 1882 to 1943. So our case files nationwide don't really start until around 1884. The original Chinese Exclusion Act, which was passed in 1882, suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years, but did permit those who had been in the U.S. since 1880 to travel and then legally re-enter. The Geary Act, which was passed in 1892, extended this prohibition against Chinese immigration and also required that resident Chinese and also Chinese American citizens that they register with the government and receive certificates of residence. These two acts were continually renewed and were in place until 1943, so the Chinese Exclusion Act period was a period of over 60 years. For those of you who were able to view yesterday's seminar on the Alien Case Files, or the A files, you all will know that in 1944, immigrants began to be documented by the INS in those A files, so if you're looking for someone who entered beginning in 1944, you might start your search for immigration records among those files. I'd also remind you that because these case files were created by the Chinese Exclusion Acts, again, 1882, they don't document the immigration of Chinese immigrants who came earlier, those first waves of immigrants such as gold miners and railroad workers. They may, however, document these individuals if they left the U.S. during the exclusion period and made applications to legally return. Next slide, please. So in addition to photographs, interrogation, interview transcripts, and various forms and correspondence, some early INS files may also have documents from the Bureau of Customs, which enforced the Exclusion Act from its beginning, as well as court affidavits also dating to the 1880s and 1890s. Now each district office of the INS arranged its own records, and we'll talk more later about how these files were arranged. At the National Archives, files are arranged by INS district, then by sub-port, and then by case file number. And in order to find your family's records, you'll need to know which port they immigrated through, and then check with the National Archives field office that would hold those records. Today, there are nearly half a million individual case files across the National Archives. File numbering systems appear to have varied between INS district offices. Early on, it looks like they used to assign numbers sequentially, but that quickly got out of hand as there were so many immigrants. So they developed another system that used hyphens and slashes, what we call the slash-dash system, that are linked to an individual's ship ticket number. That's why it can be important, as we'll discuss later, to find out when your ancestor or the person that you're researching arrived in the U.S., or when they traveled back and forth between the U.S. and China or elsewhere. Next slide, please. So, again, you'll check with the National Archives facility that has the records that relate to your particular immigrant's port of entry. You, if the person that you're researching came in through the Port of Seattle, then you're going to want to go to the National Archives at Seattle to look to see if there's a file there. If they came in through the Port of San Pedro, California, you'll go to the National Archives at Riverside and check their holdings. You may find, oftentimes, that someone will have multiple files, such that if they lived in Boston but traveled through the Port of Seattle, they may have an investigatory case file in Boston and another case file in Seattle. So your research may send you to multiple National Archives facilities. The next slide, please. So, anyone of Chinese descent who entered the U.S. during the exclusion period was investigated, and this really didn't matter who you were. This included people who were diplomats, who were students, artists and performers, and even young children. Dr. Sanyat Sen, who we see to the left of this slide, he was the first president of Democratic China, and he has an extensive case file in the National Archives because he claimed to be HB, as you can see at the top of the chalkboard that he's holding, or he was a Hawaiian-born American citizen. And Dr. Sanyat Sen made this claim in order to freely travel throughout the U.S. to fundraise for his revolutionary efforts. His wife and sister-in-law, who are Song Qingling and Song Mei Ling, came to the U.S. as students at Wesleyan University in 1907, 1908. In spite of this period of exclusion of people being very, very closely scrutinized and documented by the U.S. government, I think that we as researchers see that there's a silver lining to this cloud of exclusion, and that is that these records from this period of time still exist and that we have many files and a wealth of information to be able to share with genealogists and researchers. Next slide, please. So even the most American of professions, not just diplomats and students, teachers, or missionaries, were documented by these case files. Even actresses, like actress Anna Mae Wong, who we'll see on the next, on the slide, were documented by the INS. Anna Mae Wong was born in the U.S., in the Los Angeles area, and she was documented when she traveled to Canada through Seattle in order to film a movie. Files like hers can show the process of acculturation and Americanization, as well as how clothing styles might have changed, or as an immigrant began to use an adopted English name. Files like Anna's provide us with a unique and a highly personal view of someone's life. You'll see here on this form from her Seattle case file that her physical marks are noted to better identify her. For instance, she has a scar on the end of her left thumb. The next slide, please. As we saw from the previous page, these kinds of photographs, these head and shoulder sort of mugshot passport style images provide information to the social historian. There are lots of amazing photographs in our Chinese Exclusion Act case files. They can include things such as family portraits that were submitted by immigrants, and these family portraits will document the Americanization and the acculturation of a family. Photos can also include the interiors and exteriors of Chinese businesses, which document the Chinese American communities in these places. Next slide, please. The photographs that we'll see on this next slide are of Chun-jen Yut, who was also known as Harry Chan, and they show him over a period of 20 years time from an infant and then down into someone who was 22 years old. And these photographs were taken over time as he traveled in and out of his native, the United States. He was born here in the US and was thus considered an American citizen, and he had the ability and the privilege to be able to go back to China for education, to visit family, and then to come back into the US. So we have a case file that documents these layers of time as Harry grew older. Next slide, please. Okay. Now take a good look at this photograph, which was taken in February 1914. We're going to compare it with the next one. The two photographs were submitted to the Immigration and Naturalization Service just a few months apart, and were used by the INS during interrogation. Family members were required to identify all of the people in this photo, and you'll see the little ink written notations below each person's head. And family members were required to identify the people in this photo in order that those individuals could verify that they were who they said they were. And so that other family members who were applying for paperwork would also be able to cooperate their testimony. And individuals had to do this in order to get paperwork that would recognize them as legal US residents or citizens who could then travel outside of the US. Let's take another look. Let's take a look at the next slide, which shows the second family photograph that was submitted in May 1914. Okay, thanks. You'll see that the family has gotten quite bigger in this photograph that there are members of perhaps the extended family who would also have to be identified to immigration officials. Can you imagine being given a photograph like this of your extended family and being asked to give the names and the ages of everyone in this photograph? That's quite a task that folks were required to do. The next slide, please. So this is another photograph of a Chinese-American family. And what's notable here is that it's an interracial family. The Cable Act of 1922, which was a law that governed women's citizenship, reaffirmed that anyone who married someone who was not eligible to be a US citizen, and that would include anyone who was born in Asia and had Asian citizenship, anyone who married someone like that lost their citizenship and was thus regarded by the government as a Chinese citizen. As a result, you occasionally find women of non-Chinese descent documented in the Chinese Exclusion Act case files. This is a photograph of Mary Caskey Yi and her husband Yi Xing, who took their five children back to China to be educated in 1922. Next slide, please. On the next slide, we're going to see a sample of the interrogation of Mary Caskey, alias Mrs. Yi Xing. And you'll see a sample of the kind of information that was provided during these interrogations, information about the person's ethnicity, their place of birth, oftentimes their date of birth, their current living arrangements. You'll note here that Mary was born in the US, so thus she was a US citizen, but that she had lost her citizenship when she married Yi Xing, who was a Chinese national and a Chinese citizen. The next slide, please. So the next slide shows us a memo that was written by immigration officials that summarized Mary's family history. There are some parts here that are highlighted. The first part highlights their place of residence in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They resided at 518 North Minnesota Avenue in Sioux Falls. And the second part highlights the makeup of their family, that they had five American-born US citizen children, and that they've provided birth certificates for. And the very last part is interesting to us because we know that Mary had lost her citizenship, and yet immigration officials asserted here that she is going with Yi Xing, her husband, and of course, to quote unquote, not require any certificate under the Chinese Exclusion Law. The next slide, please. So we'll contrast the last sentence in that memo that we just saw with the handwritten note that we'll see in this next slide. And it shows us that laws were varyingly enforced across the INS as immigration officials had varying levels of contact with people of Chinese descent. This handwritten memo that was amended to the typewritten memo says, wife needs paper, inspector Holton or hoten is wrong. That indeed, because Mary had lost her citizenship and was now thus considered someone who is Chinese, for all intents and purposes, that she also needed to have documentation that would allow her to legally re-enter the US. Again, as immigration officials had varying levels of contact with the Chinese, we should remember that an interracial marriage like Mary's might have been allowed in Washington where she was leaving the US or in Michigan where she was born, but that her marriage was actually outlawed in the state where they lived in South Dakota and many other states for much of the early 20th century. The next slide, please. So what the Chinese Exclusion Act files really do is to document the INS's process of verifying the identities of these individuals. So how do you prove that you are who you say that you really are? The INS did this through interrogations, through using photographs to identify individuals, through comparing descriptions of places and events that the person was supposed to know if they were who they said that they would be. These case files contain evidence of these techniques, such as hand-drawn maps made separately by parents and their children, or maps of US cities that were filled in by individuals who claimed to have lived there previously. Next slide, please. These interrogations provide us a wealth of information. They can include the names, the age, the place of birth, marital status, the place of the marriage, and the occupation of the individual who is being interrogated. And when we say names, keep in mind that people in the Chinese traditions had various names. They could have had a married name, a name that they used in childhood or a school name, a business name, an Americanized English name, and what's most important for us was the official name that they used on their immigration records. These interrogations can also include the names of parents, siblings, their places of residence, the number and the names and places of birth of their children, any sort of previous travel history that they may have had between the US and China, and the descriptions of cities, towns, and villages in China. These interrogations are full of rich detail about one's life. And all of these details were used in comparison with interrogations made of other relatives or witnesses or with previous interrogations made of that individual to ensure that they were consistent. Next slide, please. Now, because a proof of a person's status was crucial, whether they were a merchant or a laborer, these files may also contain photos and lists relating to Chinese businesses across the United States. The following images are taken from case files from our Seattle office, and they were all taken in the first decade of the 20th century, and would now be invaluable to social historians. The next three businesses are from the same decade, but are from different geographical places. And when we look at them, we'll note the differences in the development of the cities and towns. If you happen to find one of these images in your family's case files, you are truly lucky because these don't occur in every case file. Next slide, please. This is a photograph of a business in Olympia, Washington. It sits in Columbia Street, and the questions that immigration officials asked the occupant of this building focused on how the building was used. Was the building used as a gambling establishment, as an opium den? Was it used as a boarding house? These are some typical questions that were posed to Chinese merchants and business partners. They also asked who the building was owned by and who were the partners who were involved in the business. Next slide, please. Okay, these are photographs of an alleged business and which was called Tuck Tong Company in Seattle, Washington. And this is circa 1905. Gambling seems to have been a big issue in these interrogations. As, again, the building's usage as an opium den or as a boarding house. We as archivists have made it a somewhat unscientific survey of these files. And they sort of lead us to think that Chinese were really admitted if they said that they were, say, a laundry owner or a laborer, more so than if they admitted to operating some sort of gambling establishment, surprisingly enough. Next slide, please. This is a restaurant on Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, circa 1904. So again, a really interesting snapshot of the Chinese presence in a community in the early 20th century. One of our staff even looked up this address now on Google Maps. And we now see that this location is primary estate as there's a Bank of America location on the spot. Next slide, please. Okay, at issue with these businesses was whether the business owner was a merchant or a laborer. If they were a merchant, and merchants were actually not subject to the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, then they could be legally admitted to the US. And they would also be able to bring their wives and children to the US as well. But if they had any kind of association with a business that would be considered manual labor, then that was grounds for them not to be in the US. Laborers were not permitted to come here. So when you look at photographs like this, and you'll note that there are bundles in the lower photo, you wonder, was this really a merchant partnership or was the person who was participating in this business doing manual labor? Again, if these were bundles of laundry, the person would not be permitted to be here because laundrymen were considered laborers. Next slide, please. Okay, there's one more slide with a photograph of a Chinese business. And this is a business that was a lace house dry goods company on Market Street in St. Louis, Missouri. And this came from the file of the partner who was shown second from the left, the one who's on the left-hand side of the doorway underneath the sign. And you can see from the variety of places that we've been to from Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Austin, Texas, to Seattle, and Columbia, Olympia, Washington, that the case files from one district office of the INS from Seattle show businesses from across the US and Chinese presence across the US. Next slide, please. We'll now take a look at some maps from the Chinese Exclusion Act case files. This is a blank map of Seattle, Washington, and applicants in Seattle were given pre-printed maps of the city that they were then supposed to be asked to identify where Pacific businesses were in that city because these individuals had claimed to be prior residents of that place. Well, if you had lived there before, then perhaps you should be able to tell us where some of the local banks and businesses were. So these individuals had to, in the presence of immigration officials, fill out these maps. Next slide, please. The next slide shows a map of the community in Seattle post-fire in 1903. On those who said that they had lived in Seattle prior to 1889 were often asked to identify specific information of things that happened before and after the fire in Seattle. It's not clear if this map was used to verify something that was actually drawn by the applicant or whether it is information that was taken from an interrogation where, say, the immigration official would point to a place on the map and then the applicant would have to identify, well, that was what was there before and this is what's there now. The next slide, please. The next couple of slides show a village map and these are villages in China, in rural China. The one that we'll take a look at is a father's sketch of his home village in 1924 with annotations and translations of the Chinese. And then this map would be taken and compared to one that was drawn by his son. Maps like these are sometimes used by people who are now planning a visit to their ancestral villages in China. And when they know it's really their village, they'll take the map back with them and see whether the village pond is where the map said it would be 80 years ago. And surprisingly, when these researchers who come back from China to visit the archives again tell us that very often not much has changed in the village that the fish pond is today where it was 80 years ago. Next slide, please. Do you locate one of these amazing case files? Because these files are organized by case file number and not by name, you'll need to find the case file number of at least one relative of that family to get started. So what we're going to do now is take a look at documents that are often found in family papers, documents that are found in case files that will be helpful to you. Next slide, please. A very, very common document that you will find in a family's personal possession is a Certificate of Identity. These documents were issued to anyone of Chinese descent entering the US between 1908 and 1943. Now this included immigrants as well as American-born Chinese US citizens. Many of these original certificates still remain with the descendants. Many of them have case file numbers written on them on the front or on annotations on the back of the certificate. And if there aren't any case file numbers or annotations, the information on the certificate itself can help find the file. This information on the certificate could include the name of the individual that was used with immigration officials, so their immigration name, as well as the port of entry that issued the certificate such that you'll know what National Archives field office you'll need to check with. Next slide, please. So this next slide and the slide after it show other documents that might be in a family's possession. For example, an original certificate of residence as is shown here that dates back to the 1890s, or on the next slide, and I'll go ahead and go to the next slide. On the next slide, you'll see more modern permits to re-enter the US that date to the 1930s. And again, on these documents that are in family papers, there will be case file numbers written on them and you'll see these circled here in red. And these case file numbers will help an archivist see whether there may be a file that relates to these individuals in National Archives holdings. Next slide, please. Okay, another wonderful, wonderful tool that you'll find in the case files once you've actually found the case file are these cross-reference sheets. Now sheets like these are not typically as extensive as the one that we see on the slide, but what they do is provide you with the names and case file numbers of other family members who are connected to this individual. And with this sheet, you can then go through and find other case files and sort of expand your family tree even wider. Next slide, please. So if you don't have original documents in your family, we can still access records based on names. The National Archives has developed different indexes that can be used to find case files. Volunteers across the National Archives have delved into the Chinese Exclusion Act case files file by file and have indexed the various names that they've found in those files. Not all of these are electronically available, so oftentimes you'll have to contact the appropriate field office of the National Archives to search their holdings. There are also indexes that were created by the Immigration and Naturalization Service that we can use to search to. These indexing projects are ongoing, so if you may check now and find, you may check now and not find something, but come five years from now, there may be an entry for that individual where there wasn't one before. Next slide, please. Another great tool for being able to find case files is to use passenger manifest lists. There are more modern ship passenger lists, I'm thinking of things from 1900 and after, and these can be found on genealogy websites like Ancestry or Family Search. If you are able to find one of these passenger lists, these can help to reconstruct a case file number. So if you go on to Ancestry and find a passenger list, send that list along to National Archives staff who are adept at reading the markings on a passenger list and then reconstructing file numbers based on that. Another great resource are your family members. You may be able to gather information from those family members that can age your search. For example, an older relative might know more about when your ancestor came to the US. Another source of information for immigration is a naturalization record. In the mid-20th century, many naturalization petitions included information about admission for legal residents that would list not just the date and the ship that someone came in on, but also their name at the time of entry. Next slide, please. If you are able to find a single case file relating to a family member, then you can use that file to track down other family members. So one tactic that we recommend to researchers is to track down the case file of a family member who immigrated much more recently to the US in the hopes that their immigration records can help you make the link to the ancestor who first set foot on US soil. If you get lucky, you might find a cross-reference sheet and say your great-uncle's file that points back to your great-great-grandfather's file, whose name you didn't even know. Next slide, please. So this wraps up today's presentation on the Chinese Exclusion Act case files. And to reiterate, we want to let you know that while these files can be challenging, they are able to be accessed with the help of finding aids that we have at the National Archives and the expertise of our archival staff, as well as with documents that you might have in your family papers and your own creativity in putting together your family history. The stories in these case files are rich, amazing stories. They tell not just the stories of Chinese immigrants, but Chinese-American families and our American communities. So I'll wrap up here, and I would love to take any questions that folks might have. Thank you so much, Marissa. It takes a lot of courage to step into shoes at the last minute, and you did a fabulous job. We have a few questions for you. The first one is, if I am interested in researching a Chinese neighborhood in St. Louis, what is the best method of doing the research using these records? That's a great question, because we do oftentimes get questions about Chinese-American communities in different places, so oftentimes ones where there is no longer a Chinese community and folks are sort of trying to put together a lost history. Some of the indexes that we have here that were created by NARA volunteers include fields like place of US residents. So if that was the case, and if the person who's doing the research isn't really interested in any individual in particular, but just wants to see some sample case files for folks from St. Louis, I might look at the database from that angle where I would use the database to find people who said that they had lived in St. Louis, and then I could send the researcher those names and case file numbers. The next question, would INS files outside the Chinese Exclusion Act, especially interrogations, be available? That's a great question. There are other INS files or rather RG85 files, so yes, INS files that are available through NARA. I made reference earlier in the presentation to files that were called the A files, and those document immigrants, these files were created beginning in 1944, but they often document immigrants who came to the US way before 1944. It all depends on that immigrant's life history and their interactions with the INS. The A files might be a really great source of information about people who are non-Chinese. There are other kinds of files that I understand are held by the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the INS headquarters files, as well as files that are still legally maintained by what's now the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and I believe Zach Wilski did a presentation about some of those records yesterday. And that is on file now. Another question, how much time should a researcher allow for exclusion records to be pulled after making the request? Well, I suppose that that refers to the practice that the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where you all have pull times and then would then wait for the record to be pulled. Is that right? That's because of the volume that we have here in D.C. D.C. that you all have. We all at the National Archives, at least here in San Francisco, we encourage folks to get in touch with us well in advance of them wanting to visit our facility, such that we can help them identify case files that are in our holdings, you know, say three weeks before they were planning to come in, and then to schedule an appointment with us. So we would have those files ready for them upon their arrival. I guess that's a luxury, I suppose, that we have out here in the field offices. Okay, thank you. There are two questions left. Where can I look for information from the time period when customs was overseeing enforcement? That's a great question. So prior to the formation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and its predecessors, you may find U.S. Custom Service Records in Record Group 36, and they may include things like, say, the names of people of Chinese descent, but at least here in our holdings in San Francisco, there aren't, there isn't the kind of wealth of detail about individuals that you find in later case files. And in fact, at least here in San Francisco, the U.S. Custom Service passenger lists were largely lost, so those don't even exist. Okay, and the last question, where do I look if I have a later case file number but the file is missing? Here, so if the file is missing, what I would often think is that the case file may have been consolidated into another kind of INS case file, for example, into an alien case file or a naturalization certificate case file. If that's the case, then you can search the A files that are in the holdings of now the National Archives or maybe still remain with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Oftentimes, I also point researchers to do an index search request with USCIS in the hopes that they might have tools to see whether that individual's older records were placed into a newer kind of file. Okay, thank you so much, Marissa. This concludes the National Archives' first virtual genealogy fair. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of bringing this fair to you, our speakers, our tech support, and our hotline staff. We also want to thank you, the thousands of people who actually took time and tuned in to listen to these lectures. We want you to know that the handouts in most cases and the PowerPoint slides programs will be put on our website and it'll take us about a week or so to do that so don't start looking tonight at seven o'clock but they'll be up and keep checking our genealogy fair website. You asked great questions and we truly appreciate your support of the National Archives. Thank you very much.