This book is about the unnamed Chinese immigrants who helped build the western part of the Transcontinental Railroad. While their achievements were praised at the time, their names and histories have been, for the most part, lost to time. Chang’s book is an attempt to recover some of that history.
In the mid-1800’s, the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) needed lots of workers in order to complete their portion of the railroad. After initial bias, the management of CPRR discovers that the Chinese are the best workers for the task. However, not only did they not track these workers by name, there was no long term recognition or appreciation for their efforts.
Now, a fairly low percentage of these men stayed in the US, and a smaller percentage started families. So, why did I select this book to review for my blog? While the descriptions of the actual work would apply, to some extent, to anyone’s ancestor that worked laying track in that era, the main reason has to do with how this information was put together. While it would be virtually impossible to track one specific individual from this group, Chang instead basically tracks the entire group. It is a strategy that gives us a good overview of these people’s origins, day-to-day life working on the railroad, and how that may have impacted them. He does this by looking at where most of them came from, and what beliefs and knowledge they would have brought with them. Chang was able to view internal company documents, and even though the railroads did not, for the most part, list these men individually, he found other sources, from letters and diaries to newspaper accounts, as well as stories passed down to a few descendants, that mention them. He looked at folksongs from their home region. He even found some archeological evidence that sheds light on their daily lives. As he states in his Introduction, “Though difficult, a recovery of a lost past is possible if imaginative efforts are made to understand the rich and expansive historical materials that do exist.”
In a small way, that is what I am trying to encourage with this blog. Of course, I don’t expect any of us to start doing archeological digs to learn more about our ancestors, and Chang is co-director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, so he has access to resources that the average genealogist would not have. However, I find it inspiring that he used so many different and varied sources, and managed to interpret or extrapolate from them.
If this was your family, how would you research them? Many of us hit that proverbial brick wall when we try to trace our ancestors back to the “old country”. Maybe we should try stepping back, and looking at the country or region they came from, instead of finding that one record that lists their name. Or, if they came with others from their region, we could do more digging in the part of the country in which they settled. Not only would learning about the religion, foods, folkways, traditions, and stories from a specific area give us a better insight into our heritage, but maybe, just maybe, it will help us to refocus and narrow our searches for that wall-breaking document. If nothing else, we will have learned something new, and that is always a positive thing.