An Introduction to Genealogical Sources

All this information is based on my own experience. If you have difficulty accessing the materials mentioned in this post, please shoot me an email (yu35@uwm.edu).

• The FamilySearch Center 猶他家譜學會(familysearch.org).

  1. The best place to find genealogies for historians based at U.S. institutions, the FamilySearch Center holds scanned copies of tens of thousands of Chinese genealogies, most of them produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For its religious nature, the Center does not collect genealogies in China as successfully as it does in other countries. However, it manages to acquire scanned copies of genealogies at a handful of institutions in China including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中國社科院), the Library of Hebei University (河北大學圖書館), the Xunyuan Center for Surname Culture (尋源姓氏文化中心), and the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences  (山西省社科院). It also acquired e-copies of genealogies from the Library of Congress, the Harvard-Yenching Library, the East Asian Library at Columbia University, the National Diet Library in Japan. The Center used to cooperate with the Shanghai Library, the institution that holds the largest collection of Chinese genealogies, but it only acquired a very small proportion of the latter’s collection. It also fails to acquire genealogies from the National Library of China or other provincial libraries. For this reason, the FamilySearch Center has plenty of genealogies that the Shanghai Library and the National Library of China lack, which is a boon for researchers. Most of the genealogies at the Center are available online and free for all registered users. The resources that are unavailable online, however, are available at their branches (here) all over the world. In addition to genealogies, the Center also has a decent number of other sources such as census data, local gazetteers, and monographs.

• The Shanghai Library 上海圖書館

  1. Chinese Genealogy Knowledge Service Platform 中國家譜知識服務平台(https://jiapu.library.sh.cn/#/). This is the most comprehensive online genealogy catalog. It contains bibliographical information, locations, and availability, though a considerable proportion is not correct.
  2. 8565 Genealogies (http://wrd2016.library.sh.cn/channel/stjp/). There are three levels of availability for genealogies held at the Shanghai Library: unavailable, internally available, and externally available. The institution holds 30,000 genealogies, with half of them “internally” available on site at the reading room. Within the 15,000 internally available genealogies, 8565 are externally available.
  3. Genealogy Reading Room 家譜閱覽室. On the second floor of the Shanghai Library, the reading room provides about 10 computers through which the reader access the catalog and scanned images of the “internally available” genealogies. Anyone who has obtained a Shanghai-Library ID can access the reading room. In theory, the reader can request original or hard copies, but in reality many are currently unavailable because they are under repair (at least I was told so in 2017, 2018 and 2019). If you want to access hard copies, my suggestion is to check their availability with the librarian before you go. All aforementioned service is free, but if you would like to copy, print, or save to disk some genealogy images, the library charge about 1 RMB/page.
  4. Note 1: the Shanghai Library acquired its first and the most important collection of genealogies from paper factories, where peasants sold their genealogies as used paper. For this reason, many genealogies now held at the Shanghai Library are incomplete.
  5. Note 2: The genealogy reading room at the Shanghai Library charges 1 RMB for printing or copying, which is inconvenient for historians who usually have no idea what part of a genealogy might be the most useful. However, the Library is becoming more generous as they first put 500 genealogies online in 2015, increased the number to 6086 in 2017, and to 8665 in 2019. If we believe the world is getting better, we have good reasons to expect the Library will open more genealogies.

• The National Library of China (NLC) 中國國家圖書館

  1. Genealogies
  2. Zhonghua guji ziyuanku

• The Library of Congress (LOC)

  1. Chinese Rare Book Digital Collection (https://www.loc.gov/collections/chinese-rare-books/). At least 15 genealogies, most of them Ming genealogies. In very good quality.

• Harvard-Yenching Library

• Columbia University

• The University of Chicago

• UC-Berkeley

• Stanford University

• University of Hawaii

• University of British Columbia

• The British Library

• Academia Historica

• Hong Kong Public Libraries

• The Kyoto University Research Centre for the Cultural Sciences

• Leiden University

• UCLA

• University of Malaya

• University of Washington

• University of Pittsburgh