 Hi everybody. So welcome to our second episode of the Global Spotlight and my first episode because I had unexpected situation occur last time and I wound up missing and left Betsy and Sandy depend for themselves. But I am here today and we are going to get started with really our first true episode. Last time was kind of an introduction but this time we're going to get into some of the some depths into one of our many nations and also kind of a little how-to towards the end. So what I want to do first we are I'm looking down the list of people in the chat room and I recognize most of the names but I'm going to assume there may be some people who are brand new to the Global Project. So if those of you that are very familiar with us could bear with us just briefly I'm going to give a little bit of background on the project and an update on where things stand right now. The Global Project, if we can actually Betsy can we pull the Global Project screen up? The Global Project stemmed from last year's 15 Nations Tour. That was a project where every three weeks we selected a new country. What I call genealogically obscure country meaning they may not be obscure in the world but they are obscure in the world of genealogy countries that we don't see very often. If you go to your local bookstore you can probably find books on Scandinavian genealogy, English, German, French genealogy. You're not going to find Zimbabwe and genealogy books. You're not going to find Azerbaijani books but people have family from there and there's not a lot of easy to find places to go to do those do that research. So we did the 15 Nations Tour every three weeks we picked another country and we traced the roots of 15 individuals from that country but the the fun part of it the cool part of it was that on day one we had no idea what we were doing but each country it was it was brand new we had no list of resources it was up to our team to figure it out and by the end of the third week we generally had um well we had anywhere from one to I believe 14 was our most successful country one to 14 um notables connected to the big tree so not only were we able to do the research but we were able to find the links to get them on to the tree as it currently stands so that um that was really a fun year-long adventure that we had when it was over we it was it was a lot of work and we couldn't I I couldn't maintain a whole nother year of it but what we decided to do was put in something permanent and we created this global project the global project will eventually have a project page for every country of the world and the list of countries that we're using includes 199 countries 24 those countries are already overseen by top tier projects and we're not messing with those countries at all those people have their act together already and we're leaving them alone we but we do have links to their pages on our site so if you want to do English research or French research you can get a link from the global project David David where where would okay so if you click on the country well let me let me give a little um side note here in the center there you see worldwide projects we also oversee where the umbrella project for any project that doesn't have a parent project so anybody that starts a small project that doesn't fit into the french project or the notables project or or any of the other categories those will go under worldwide project right now we have two we have first responders and we have remember the children those are global projects in the sense that they cover the entire world but they don't quite fit under any other any other project parent project and they're not quite big enough to be top tier projects on their own so that's why they go here so if anybody were to start a project didn't know where to go you can contact us and if we can't find your place we'll put you here on the worldwide projects um but if we go over to the next tab on the country projects you're going to see a list of again 199 countries okay before you scroll down there though Betsy let's go to the very top and there'll be a there's a green link that says click here right there if you click on that you're going to get just the top tier projects got it okay so this is the 24 i've lose 24 um countries that currently have their own they were completely dependent of the global project um but again we do provide the links here you know so if you're not clear if it's a top tier project or not don't worry about it if you click on it it'll take you to their page and and you'll see from there okay great um so again if we go back to the the prior page yep um this is a list of all the 199 again you will find the top tier projects on this page as well they're identified with an asterisk but um if you're looking for a complete list to go to the other page um and we basically have um right now two sets of countries we have countries that have leaders and countries that don't the pages that don't have leaders we're going to talk about those today um are still up and have a ton of information that you can use if you're interested in doing research in that um in that country they don't have a community pooled together yet you're not going to have people to work with um immediately but eventually in time um we hope to get people into most of these countries if not all of them and form some communities but the pages themselves are great resources even if you don't have a community now right now we have about 25 countries that have gained um leaders since january 1st so that brings us up from the original 24 top tier countries up to about 50 countries now that have leadership so um that's not too shabby for that's been six weeks since we opened um great we have about 75 countries that have pages so um you'll see anyone that's any country there that's in bold has a page if it's underlined um well i'm sorry no it's bold it's underlined that's the same thing so um so again we have about 75 countries that have pages that you can now visit if it's not bold it means that the pages are still in in process um they um it's i was hoping to have them all up by january 1st but it turned out to be a much lower process than i thought um it's not just coming up with all the information but typing it in and creating all the links and giving the graphics in and that so um you know a page can take um a day or two depending on the on the country um and when i say a page it's actually four pages per country so we're talking um about 800 pages of material yeah that that's um so it's a lot yeah um so so today um you know if anybody has any questions on the global project in general let us know um but today um we are going to have one of our project leaders which is Betsy Ko who has graciously accepted the leadership of of taiwan um she's going to take us through the taiwan um project and we're working at this for two angles we want you to learn a little bit about taiwan that's that's the the theme of today's um episode but um realize that what Betsy shows you on the taiwan project is going to be very similar to what you're going to find on any of the other country projects the template is the same um when i create the project i use the same format the data changes but the format stays the same once that leader takes over and members start joining they're free to make um pretty much whatever changes they want so over time uh some of these countries may take their own direction as far as their formatting and what they include and what they don't include uh but but for right now you're going to find pretty much the same thing on any page and um and then the one last thing i want to say before we move on to taiwan is that if anybody's interested in managing a country the guy told you we have about 50 countries already adopted some of them um some people have adopted more than one country so it's not necessarily 50 individuals but um i'm sorry it's 25 new countries and then the 25 top tier countries but um if you're interested in leading let me know and you just drop me an email and i can get back with you and talk about what what it entails uh if you're not interested in leading a country but you want to join on the membership uh even if we don't have a leader we can still put you down as a member and as the the community grows we um you'll already be signed up for that um and then third if you're not interested in being a member or a leader realize that anybody can visit these pages so even if you're not signed up or you just have a passing interest and and want to spend a couple hours looking you know looking looking through a country it's all accessible to anybody so you don't necessarily have to be a member to to um take advantage of it um the other thing is it may not be your family that um you're going to need to do the research for but i know a lot of people work with the notables project and we have notables from around the world you might have a friend or relative or neighbor that is interested um this is a place you can send them what we're really hoping i think what makes this um project unique across the internet there are places that have there are very few but there are a couple sites that have data for obscure countries but they don't have a team for every country so you're not going to find a community along with the genealogical resources and information all in one place for every country of the world um i don't know that there's any place else that has that and that's what um you know i'm really excited over time that this is going to be able to grow and um really kind of be um a way for wiki to distinguish itself beyond the ways that it already does so shall we head on over to taiwan sure yeah absolutely and i you know before we launch officially into talking about taiwan i i just want to take a moment to thank david and and really emphasize the herculean amount of work that he's done and um for i have had a personal interest in in seeing a taiwan project on wiki tree for some time now but it always kind of stayed a little lower on the list because it just felt so intimidating so what david has done by starting the global project and providing that infrastructure where i was able to start out with these these wonderful resource pages um not not just for myself but to offer other members future members of the project i mean that's just i'm so grateful for that david because i think if it hadn't had been for that i that that goal would have you know been a long time coming for me well and in turn you know i want to thank the team i had on the 15 nations because the work it was the work that they did that made me realize this was possible i see um several of our members are in the chat right now but um had you come to me last year and suggested this idea i would have thought it was crazy it's like i don't know how to do this but that was kind of what we realized was that we don't know how to do it because the information is not out there read easily findable but it is out there and the successes the team had on the 15 nations led us to realize that um there's actually this is actually doable um and i'm found you know i'm i'm at this point i'm going somewhat alphabetically and i've i've finished all the ab and c countries so everything from malbania to azerbaijan to um cameroon and there's resources out there for every one of those countries it's just not well known so um and and again a year ago i wouldn't have assumed that um but having been through the 15 nations and seen what people could do and the the resources that they were able to find um i realized you know we could do this for every country in the world there's no reason not to and i again i don't think anybody else out there is really doing it in the way that we're doing it but we'll talk about some of the the sites out there that are doing it because i think they um compliment us they don't necessarily i don't see them as rivals or um competitors as much as um additional resources that we can use but um the information is out there no matter where you um no matter where you're searching there's information we'll talk about the different types of information because if you want to know where your um taiwanese ancestors lived in 1450 um you're probably not going to find a lot of names and dates and places but you can still learn about the history and that that's out there so we'll talk about that too as we get a little further into the show and i saw a few people in the chat wondering how do i join the global project so i just put um the link to the g2g post in the chat it's just like any other project and you know you just respond to the g2g post and um david and um or anwin or steve will get to get a badge on your profile yeah and and you can join the global project as a whole right now we're focusing on the countries we we have talks about certain projects sub projects that we can do that are global in nature um we talk about doing a foreign language project um a name project so for example if you have um an arabic country the naming patterns may be the same in several different countries so rather than individually researching that in each of the countries we may have a um you know a group that studies arabic names and arabic language and you know how that can apply to all the different groups so we'll broaden out over time into global topics but um right now because it's basically just me and i'm still got um a hundred and some some odd countries to develop we're not there yet but that is something um we're gonna look to bring some additional leaders on and you know maybe develop that so again you can join the global project as a whole but there's not a lot of activity there the activity is going to be in the individual countries so if you've got an interest in in the countries that you still you'll still join the global project but let us know what country you want to be part of and we'll get you on the list and you could be as part of as many countries as you'd like to be there's no there's no limit great um well i'll just start by by giving just a little bit of a personal introduction so i am half taiwanese my father was born and raised in taipei and came to the united states in the 1950s um and my mother's american and um you know i was completely born and raised here in the states um and my my early impressions of taiwan i mean i i understood that my father came from someplace far far away none of his family live nearby um we my grandfather did come for a couple of visits um here we are in in my home in in new york when i was growing up um but outside of that i i really um didn't appreciate um my heritage and it's been a journey really in fits and spurts i made my first trip to taiwan when i was in high school um early 80s that was very interesting because um things were still very much um there was a different feel um given the political climate um compared to when i spent a summer there i lived there for a summer in 1995 and i had the opportunity to uh to i'm sorry i lived there a few for years for years later um in in the 80s and um things were starting to loosen up um i had an opportunity to study mandarin um and uh my mandarin is not wonderful um and i think that with the asian countries that is people feel like that's a barrier um but they're definitely um i don't want to let that to stand in my way i think like with genealogy of any foreign country if you know a few key things that's going to be a big help in um you know recognize the word for baptism or for for marriage it's it's gonna um take you um part of the way to where you want to go um just as an example um will return to my grandfather's profile and um so what i've done he he did calligraphy and so you can see here on the uh on the left hand side um we've got some numbers 10 3 because the scroll is from um one Corinthians chapter 13 and down here we've got numbers 79 7 10 9 so the which was the year he did it 1979 so if you know your numbers that can be extremely helpful that's not too bad 10 pictograms um and then um his name here um so i have uh even though despite the fact that i have you know i'm i'm american through and through um i feel very closely um drawn i feel my identity as a taiwanese person um even though i'm only half but um it's still a place that's very dear to me so i you know and i'd also like to say that with the global projects any of the country projects you don't have to be ethnically that that um whatever the country is um if you have visited there if you um if you have friends there if you just you enjoy maybe you've never even been there but you enjoy cultural things that you you know have experienced here outside of the country but you are intrigued by it um those are all great reasons to pick a country to be involved in um and so let's dive into the pages that david constructed um so as he said there's multiple pages for each country so you want to uh make sure that you pay attention to these tabs so um right now i'm going to go to i'm going to go to the uh can you go back to the um to the global homepage and and access it from oh absolutely to show them right from beginning if you go to the global project uh you're going to see three tabs up there and you're going to click on the country projects right and that's where you'll get your alphabetized list of countries right and if it's old and that means we have an active um we have active pages if it's not old we're still they're still pending right so uh there i am i've made it to the tease great and and um betsey just scroll down but at the top but there's a the letters of the alphabet if you click on the if you click on the t um it'll take you right down to the bottom it's not that hard to scroll down but if you want to shortcut it saves you it saves you two seconds okay so um here we have um your your your basic need to know um the mission of the project um to provide members who have shared an interest in taiwanese genealogy with a hub from which to research learn and grow alongside others with the same um geographic and genealogical interests um so you would um i'm going to be putting up a g2g post for the project later today and just like any other project um you'll you'll want to follow the tag taiwan to be to be looked into all communications i would recommend that you follow the tag taiwan and then also the tag global so you'll get the general information on the project yeah you do not have badges for every country um so you'll get a global badge you won't get a taiwan badge at this point but you will get the global badge right now there are only five people in all of wikitree following the taiwan tag so it's new yep yep looking forward to seeing that reach double maybe even triple digits we'll see um and one other little pointer here on the screen if you scroll just a tiny bit well actually you're there i'm in that box you'll see where it says coordinator betsy co if you go to a country page and that coordinator's spot is empty that means we're still looking for someone so um if we have a coordinator their name will be there if we don't battle the empty and if you're interested again drop me a note and we'll we'll get you hooked up yeah um and when i do do the the g2g post when it's completed i'll link it here as well okay analysis asking a question right now about adding the global tag um just for clarification when you add a tag you get um direct you get a you have an abbreviated g2g um thread is that what we call it that that you receive based on the tags that you choose so if you want to make sure you get any messages regarding taiwan let's say you're gonna want to put add the taiwan tag if you want to get the general messages from the global project you want to add the global tag um you don't have to add those but that's what we'll get you um that's what it will make sure that you receive any messages that we post for either the country project or the global project as a whole yeah um so the goals um to uh collaborate bring like-minded wiki trees together so that we can collaborate as with all our profiles profiles in this case to make every taiwanese profile on wiki tree the best that it can be uh to provide a single hub where we can gather the all the resources that we're aware of uh and info information that helps us build and document these the the profiles and to help the members of the project gain skill and expertise in researching taiwanese family history um and to help you know those we're looking hopefully ideally we'll have members of all different levels um and i i may be a tiny bit farther along but i i know that i have a great deal that i still need to learn so i i'm excited to to learn it um so let's go on to the next tab um on this on this uh taiwan tab um david is put together um things about location um administrative divisions you know anyone who's ever um dove into an unfamiliar country realizes pretty quickly you have to understand how that country organizes its its area you know whether it's counties or provinces or states so um yeah because depending on the country that's often where the records are going to be right right so you're going to want to know and also you may read that your ancestor was from this region or that region if you don't know what the what a region is in that country is it a county is it a district is it a um you know there's all all kinds of different terminology they use right so that's helpful um and you can take that information and go back to wikipedia and usually the various counties districts etc will have their own articles and sometimes um they're um those districts are created based on ethical breakdowns um you know cultural breakdowns so sometimes you can learn a lot about your ancestors um life just by knowing what part of the country they were from where they farmers where they city dwellers you know that that alone is um tells you something right and i was even um reading earlier today um well many many taiwanese came over from from fujian uh in mainland china during the uh 1700s 1800s so if you're looking for records prior to that date with your family who came over from fujian they might be in fujian so um yeah it's uh it's you gotta you gotta know where to where to look depending on when when you are uh searching i mean there's a very helpful graphic that i'll show in in a few minutes turn to do with it do with that um davin's given us some history which is important to understanding um the individuals you're you're researching and how how their lives were affected particularly if the country borders changed or the names of the country changed right um for instance many people may not be aware that um taiwan was formerly called formosa uh because it was a portuguese colony uh back in um let's see the 1600s um yeah and that that meant beautiful country um and so it was being referred to as formosa even you know into the 20th century um that name sort of persisted yeah and until i put this together i didn't know that i'd heard of formosa i won but i had no idea they were the same place yeah and i i didn't realize this you put this here somewhere you put that maybe it was on the next page um that tai very close variation of taiwan was what the british called it that the portuguese called it formosa but the british called it taiwan or something like that so you know i never knew where taiwan itself came from and of course the other official name is the republic of china david talks about the uh the different um ethnic groups um there are sort of two large subgroups who are ethnically chinese um well actually three on this third group the waishengrun are uh those who came over from mainland china um at the after the civil war in the mid 20th century um and then there's indigenous people as well um who um there's been a large resurgent in in the last decade of two of of um celebrating their identities and culture um mandarin is the official language uh of taiwan but there's also taiwanese and in some other sub dialects um they all share the same characters um just to give an example um my last name if you showed the character and to someone and said how do you uh say this in mandarin it would be kuh and but if you showed it to the taiwanese speaker it would be guap so you have to be very sort of flexible and a little knowledgeable to know that these dialects can change things a little bit and so can transliteration um for instance i mentioned fujian um which can be spelled with a j fujian or if you can also see it as fukian with a k um so tread tread a little slowly um and just know that i mean when you go to transliterate um a language like chinese um they're they're different systems and they're going to be a few little um variations um so this is a really good page to read thoroughly and and uh david links um to wikipedia articles for a deeper dive in some of these topics um yeah so a bit of a disclaimer on these pages um is when i when i put these pages together i i basically spend an afternoon researching the country and then i i spend the evening pulling the page together um that afternoon of research doesn't really make me an expert on the country um so these pages are very rudimentary um primarily they're intended as a template i hope to get the gist of it correct um but you may find that there are errors or things that um if not errors maybe just not as um detailed as they need to be so that's where the team is supposed to come in we're looking for people to come in and and elaborate on what what i've presented here in a basic form i would i would put this probably at a um you know maybe a middle school level of of um of information which i sometimes appreciate having a middle school explanation rather than a college thesis um level explanation um but it is you know be prepared that this is real basic um for example the naming conventions um you know i i i put down some information that that i was able to to gather but i'm sure it's much more complicated and you may want to even put as the team to develop a whole separate page just for naming conventions or for languages or you know information on specific ethnic groups so our hope is that these pages will blossom into something much bigger this is not the the final phase this is the initial phase um you know when you go back to the history section um it certainly doesn't cover the entire history of taiwan but it does give the beginner an idea for example that that it used to be called for mosa that's um you know that's a real basic piece of information that's helpful to have um so we try to get that in there but um you know i just want people to know that we recognize that this is very um rudimentary information again hopefully we'll be able to develop teams for these countries who can bring in greater expertise than i have and flesh them out into something um something much more yeah no it's i think it's a great start these the page is a great starting place and i i didn't know 100 percent of everything on the page or or you you allowed me to refresh my memory on on some details that got in the little foggy so it's great um what i've also done is i've started a free space page um which i will right now it's locked down um because i'm still working on it but i'll unlock it shortly um resources for understanding taiwan and just recognizing that everybody has a different way in which they like to learn so i've sorted these out into fiction uh nonfiction podcasts um i think i'll add in maybe youtube channels maybe that could go under uh social media accounts movies as you can see it's it's still under construction but these are things that content that you can um consume in order to better understand the history um and then the culture and and particularly if you're researching people who have lived more recently taiwanese people um to to understand sort of the vibe of the country um so um like for the for or for instance this one this podcast hearts in taiwan the two people who do that are for our second generation taiwanese like me so um their perspective um talking to their parents and visiting and you know i think all of it collectively provides a well-informed um uh perspective on the country so that is coming up soon let's see going back like now let's take a look at the resources page um so again um david has here articles on wikipedia related to taiwan um yep we're not seeing yours but can we do um the people page first and then we'll begin with the resources sounds good that's going to take a little bit of time okay just real quickly if we show the what we've got here on the people page so people know yep okay and again the format's the same on um all of our country pages we have at the top we list the head um of state and the head of government some countries that's two people some it's one um some it's a king some it's a president but we have the current leaders listed there um and and uh there will be a change in president come spring coming soon yeah so keeping up to date you might find um if they've had a recent change um if nobody's actively managing the project it may take us a while to find that out and get that change but as of the day that the page is created those are the current um rulers um and then every country if they've ever had a monarchy i list the last monarch so in this case we're going back to the 1800s um for a lot of our european countries we're just going back to the 1940s world war two when a lot of the monarchy fell and some countries didn't have a monarch haven't had a monarchy in hundreds of years um and we're going back to maybe the 1400s or so but if they ever had a monarchy i um include a little blurb on it and then list the most recent monarch typically if you go to that monarch's um profile page we have succession boxes where you can scroll back um one generation of of monarchs after the other we don't have that here um i don't know how many of the ancient um not real ancient but the 1800s um monarchs we have profiles for um but typically if you go to you know king charles's what um profile page there'll be a link to queen elizabeth and there'll be a link to her father and his father and so on which is why we don't put all the monarchs on the page once you get the first one you can scroll through to go back as far as you need to and then we just um have a few just for interest there's no rhyme or reason other than these are um important people in taiwanese history um some are connected some are not it's not a challenge it's not a project it's just interesting um people from the country uh a team is free to change these out if you've got other people you'd like to put in um some are taiwanese um famous in taiwan others as you see down here are famous americans who happen to be from taiwan um but um they're just interesting people who um you know i want to read up on some of them need profiles written some of them need connections uh so if you want to kind of turn it into a little challenge that's fine um but the purpose is just to highlight some of the interesting people from the country um some of some countries um we've got our our um south pacific island countries that don't have a whole lot of world-known um celebrities so we're coming up with several is a little bit of a challenge and then you got others i was working on italy yesterday or they've got Michelangelo and so on and so on it's not hard at all to find notables taiwan's a small country but they're also a very powerful country in a way so they do have a um a global presence and some of these are there because they're living the profiles are are uh no i couldn't see them um who was it um like i couldn't see one to li's profile okay that we can fix because if they're on here it means they're qualified as living notables so they should be visible if they're not it's just an oversight okay i know betsy probably knows this is um we can see things that the membership can't so sometimes the pages look perfectly fine to us um and we don't realize that um the general membership doesn't or if you're if you're a profile manager you can see everything on that profile but if the profile's locked nobody else can see it so it looks fine to you um but if you're not paying attention you don't realize that not everybody else can can see what you can see so i'll take a look at those and make sure that they're all open if they're not great okay all right so you won't be able to edit them because they're living individuals yeah um but if we can find out that the parents or deceased relatives we can you know we can build out their trees based on that okay um should we go to resources so we go to resources now this is the final tab um what what you see there that says global home page is the final tab that just takes you back to the to the main page so we're really looking at four pages of content and then a fifth tab taking you back to the beginning okay so resources so let's move into our kind of our um how to component um today what i want to talk about today is basically what do you do and this is what we learned with our 15 nations um project what do you do when you are needing to do research in a country that you know absolutely nothing about where do you begin and that's what again that's what we had to figure out with the 15 nation store um and that's what we're hoping to make a little easier for you with these pages here but right now um if it happens to be one of the pages we have uh set up already you can come to this resources page and it'll give you a start if not you can follow the same formula for any other countries that we don't have pages up yeah um the first place that i always go is wikipedia because it'll give you a very good summary of the country all that stuff that i showed you before you're going to give in more detail or the best he showed you i should say um you're going to get it even you know greater detail on wikipedia but you're not going to get overwhelmed with with technicalities you're going to get a real simple primer that'll just kind of get your head in a place where you understand the basics of what you need to know going into the country or they'll tell you about the history they'll tell you the geography i'll get all the stuff we had on the earlier pages the ethnicities the religions they'll go into a lot of um modern stuff too that we've left out they'll talk about the current government they'll talk about um entertainment and sports and and things that don't necessarily help us with with genealogy um but are still might be of interest to you um but that's where i always start is just go to wikipedia and get it's kind of like when you know when i was a kid i'd open up the encyclopedia you always say well the encyclopedia isn't an acceptable reference but it's certainly a good place to start to get get a kind of a grasp on the topic you're looking at um i had i showed my um almanac to the some kids the other day and they what's the almanac and i said it's kind of like the print version of the internet haha it's a good way to describe it um um but then these next sources um this is this is kind of the steps that i do i go to family search and i go to ancestry if you have an ancestry subscription grade if you don't um you're not going to get as much there but um family search has um they're all wiki and a wiki if you're not clear on what a wiki is it basically means it's it's like a crowdsourced um encyclopedia if you will it can be on any topic family searches topic is genealogy and they have information on every country of the world as i said before um i don't see them as a competitor here i see this as a real um great supplement to what we're doing we don't have to pull us all this information over to wiki tree because it's here on the family search wiki and they provide um again they have they have well they claim to have information on 250 countries i don't know 250 countries i only know 200 so i'm not sure how they define country but they probably have some that are more dependencies and territories and those kinds of things but um it's a great starter resource now because it's a wiki it means the community contributes and it's only as good as what people post so it's not um 100 accurate all the time some countries have much more information than other countries if you're looking for research in sweden or the netherlands you're going to get a whole lot of information broken down probably to um you know their county level to the city level to small towns and amelots even if you're looking for information on um you know azerbaijan that's one i always use because it's a fun name to say um but um but it's not something that there's probably as as much information if you're looking for information on afghanistan um it's it's a well-known country but with the taliban in place and all of that there you're not going to get as much information so um but that doesn't mean there aren't resources out there and family search is a great place to start looking for that um and they also have their own records so not on the their wiki will take you to places off of family search it'll take you um it'll provide you links to other websites but it'll also give you information on um offline resources um but they also give you links to their own records so if they have uh records on chinese genealogy or whatever country days you're looking for uh you'll find you'll find information on that here as well um the big sites family search ancestry dot com tend to um well i think they began with us records and moved into western european records and related countries australia south africa those countries they are now moving into african asian latin american countries more and more so you're seeing more records up than you would have say a decade ago um but it's still you know heavily um weighted towards the western european and united states countries now i'm pretty sure if i could just step in um it was on family search that i found this pdf um which is let's see it's um it seems like it's uh that it's very old look at this um revised 1976 so but nevertheless this has got some really valuable information because um you know the things that i'm interested in um record you know when records started being collected um that's not going to change um so it i like this table where it says the censuses okay and i actually i saw in the chat that yoke was commenting that there's a lot of um japanese influences on taiwanese culture and the reason for that is that japan occupied taiwan from 1895 to 1945 so um there's and that that's another twist um for instance my my father had a japanese name that he used in school and official documents that was distinct from his chinese name and i remember the first time i saw that i was very confused and then i researched more and you know it became clear what was going on yeah um and and this table is is fantastic because look at all those records that are available genealogical records um and this is stuff that you you're not going to find um you're not going to find this everywhere you know but it is it is out there and the more we can find the stuff and and add it to our links page right the more people are going to get help with this um but the information is there you know it when when i started working with the team on the 15 nations my first instinct was well there's not going to be records in those countries um but they were in every country we visited the records were there you just had to figure out where to find them now again if you're doing afghanistan the records may be there but the taliban may not be sharing records at the moment um so that adds some challenges um but there are records there and some and and another thing as you mentioned with the japanese etc um a lot of these countries were um a lot of countries were overseeing by other countries during various times in their history and i know when we did india for example a lot of the records were in london because it was a british territory and all the records census records etc from india were not in india they were in london so um you know if a country may not have the most um accessible records right now it could very well be that the records are being held in a different country right so that's that's where the history is important i'll also say what you were mentioning the names um you know i was doing a little research on taiwan pre for the show i discovered that prior to 1913 they didn't have last names officially and there was a law pass that said everybody had to have a name and so people chose their name often based on you know occupation where they live certain traits so you can sometimes tell a little bit about or hypothesize a little bit about your family's origins if you know um what their name means but what i also found out that was interesting is that if you were a civil servant working for the government the president got to pick your name the citizens in general got to pick their own name unless they work for the government and then the president got to pick their name for them so that was interesting very much so did you have any more to say on family search on family search wiki is a is an incredibly rich and we should say it's not just country information you can look up census records and you can look up birth certificates and it'll tell you right you know any i i think i wrote down here um they have over a thousand topics over 250 country topics yeah so there's there's a lot of information over there if you're not familiar with it if you're doing genealogical research you need to become familiar with that because it's a great resource now ancestry um is a little different it's somewhat hit and miss most of their world documents you're going to have to pay a membership to to access um so it's a little bit of a limitation there for for some people my recommendation is if you don't have you know if it's not a year long project you're working on and you can get in and out you know just do a month long membership get in get the record you need and then close out i don't do a lot of world um worldwide research for my own family so i have a year round membership with ancestry but i only add the the world membership about maybe twice a year um and i get in and do all my world research and then step out um so i'm not paying for months that i'm not using yeah um now if you're going to be on it all year you get a discount if you sign up for the year but if you're not going to be doing the research the discount doesn't really matter um so ancestry again heavily on the western european but it um you know but it it um it it has more and more worldwide records what i would do is go to the card catalog um the general card catalog and there'll be a search box um you can search by the title first i put in the name of the country you put in taiwan and it'll come up with any records that have taiwan in the name so those would be your most obvious um resources if that doesn't give you what you need you can put it in the general search and it'll give you any documents that have taiwan in the description now that's going to get you things like fam find a grave um some really broad um categories but that's still you know that still might um prompt some thinking that you haven't that you haven't thought you might not have thought to go to find a grave but um if they have taiwanese graves in at find a grave ancestry will let you know that so so it's not the most um the beneficial site for worldwide research outside of again western european um but you find some treasures there that you may not have known um somebody may have gone in and transcribed some taiwanese census records and they may have them so um worth worth a look yeah cindy's list um most people are probably familiar with it um she basically collects links she's been doing it for decades and she uh collects links to various genealogical sites some of them are very um our sites that are not necessarily genealogical but um can be utilized for genealogy so things that again you might not have thought of she um categorizes them generally she categorizes them by continent and then within the continent if the country has enough resources she'll give an individual page or um so she might um you know have a china um category um you know some of the bigger countries if she has enough links she'll give that they may not again all be genealogical they may have to do with language history culture um but it's definitely worth a try um you know seeing what she has um then next on the list we have um world gen web world gen web's been around a long time and i'm not quite sure how well managed it is it's really hit in this um it's kind of like a wiki but people adopt a country and then they develop the pages kind of what we're doing over it at wiki tree um but i find in my experience the vast number of countries are very underdeveloped but again every once in a while i hit on a country where they have really interesting resources they started out with us gen web which has a link to each of the 50 states and then within that each of the counties within the states and that's really cool if you're looking to do um american um research but for the world um the global resources the world gen web all you need to do is type in your country in place of world so instead of world gen web look for taiwan gen web and it'll take you to that page um again for a lot of the countries i didn't see a lot of value on them but um there are some countries that have some really good some really good resources so you just have to to give it a try and see what you find um the library of congress i hadn't thought of this until we did our 15 nations but the library of congress which is you know the united states library of congress but it's open to anybody around the world or you can go to their website they have information from all over the world they have documents from all over the world um and they have what they call reading rooms so they have an asia reading room an africa reading room and you can um go in and see what they have in terms of uh documents there they have um you know literally millions of of pieces of material that you can that you can research um the the thing with um the well i'm sorry the library of congress also for some places produces um pamphlets and those are online you can get them hard copy but they also are online so for some countries and it's just a matter of um i guess how much interest people have as to whether they come up with a a document or not but you'll find a um taiwanese genealogy pamphlet potentially and tell you all about their resources and how to do um research i'd say i found probably maybe a third of the countries that i've i've looked at so far have had pamphlets so there's a lot of them um but it's not every country some it's more broader it's um it may be um um a pamphlet on researching in southeast asia and it covers several countries um researching in the middle east those kinds of things so it's not always country by country um but again there's some really good resources there whether uh you're a u.s citizen or not you can still access the library and um even again if you're not doing u.s research they have tons of research from all or tons of materials from all over the world great and it's not all genealogy it's it's well it's it's broader broader but that that in the broader context informs good genealogy yeah and then for every country i've added the national archives and the national library i have yet and i think i've said i've done about 70 countries i have yet to find a country that does not have their national archives and their national library online with records available um now afghanistan does have national archives they have 400 records in their archives due to all the damage from the war um that's all that remains but nonetheless they do have archivists they do have historians there so this is um the next piece that i'd like to recommend don't trap yourself online a lot of research that you're going to need to do is going to have to be done offline so take these sources such as the national archives um now you can do email but write a letter to the archives write an email to the archives and say what can you do for me um a lot of times just like when you're when you know in the u.s i'm sorry there's my phone um in the u.s we do county county research if you're in los angeles county or some of the major counties you may not get um real um hands-on attention from from the archive is there but if you're in an obscure rural community somewhere they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for somebody to call that they could help so i think a lot of these um international archives libraries etc um you probably find the same experience that there's people that would be thrilled to help you out with your research you don't know but it's worth giving it a try but don't feel if it's not online that you have nowhere to go go contact an expert another recommendation is contact your local university and talk to their history department find out if they know anything about records wherever is your researching um you know but find find experts who know where the records are and ask them find out what's available and um you know track them down but there's there's not a place in the world that doesn't have some records somewhere um you just have to know how to access them absolutely um and let's see our third our last one national central library of taiwan and they have a youtube channel which i've already subscribed to uh so and you should have on your computer a translation button for the internet so a lot of these sites you may find are not written in english um but your browser should have a button somewhere that you can click on that'll translate the page for you and and presented in english so you can read it yeah and you look down there if you go back to where you just were yep not only do they have the library but you scroll down to the bottom while you look at those tabs up there at the top but also they're at the bottom um you know their online catalog their digital library thesis and dissertations you know there could be some amazing information in there so so the last thing we're already at one o'clock we've got a little bit over time here but um you know the last thing i want to say there is you may not be able to find the names and dates for all of your ancestors particularly going back um past the 19th or 20th 19th centuries um that you know if you as i was saying to betsey earlier if you want to find your taiwanese ancestor um who lived in the 1400s you know there may not be you know pretty good if he was a farmer in some rural community may not be able to a lot of documents you're going to be able to access there but you can still by pulling a history together you can still um put a story together and get an idea of where your ancestors came from what their lives were like study the community study the um you know the culture of the time you know was was it a um you know was it an independent nation was it a kingdom was it um occupied by the japanese was it you know um you know whatever um you know i've done that with with the story i'm writing on my own family i go back to the dna and i know that my family um you know was from england but i'm i can kind of tell the story of how they got to england i don't know the names of the people that came over to england but i know based on their genetic history um where they came from and i know when those those groups of people came to england so i can kind of give a time estimate on when they probably immigrated um you know i use that word in my narrative probably possibly could have hypothesize you know i don't state it as fact but you can put an interesting story together on your family even if you don't have names and dates and specific places so i think that probably wraps up our our first our first our second first episode um i would like to ask if anybody has any recommendations for topics um you know we're going to be doing this once a month so i've got ten more topics i need to come up with before the end of the year um i've got a few ideas but if anybody has anything that they would like to know on doing research in other countries we'll try to keep it broad enough that applies to um any country but we can talk about specific regions and stuff etc um and again if anybody's interested in signing up to host a country let me know if you just want to be a member let me know that if not and you just want to go over and browse the site is open um go over there and look around and maybe learn a few things about some countries you didn't know anything about um so i appreciate everybody's time i appreciate um you joining me today betsey of course i enjoyed it yeah and um i don't see any questions here in the chat room so um we will wrap it up with that and we will see you um i don't know the date but really uh march march 18th it'll be a little monday uh at one o'clock eastern excuse me yes um that will be after root stack um betsey and i will both be at root stack early in the in the in the month but uh we will be back and have our next episode for you so again thank you everybody for um showing up and we will see you next month okay bye bye thank you david bye everyone thank you