If you’re interested in discovering your family history, there are a number of resources available.
JANM will be hosting a day-long class “Discover Your Japanese American Roots,” on Saturday, March 31 from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Cost: $44 members, $55 non-members. Materials and museum admission included. Limited to 16 participants. More information is available at www.janm.org.
The class, taught by Chester Hashizume, offers curious participants advice and tools on how to fill in the blanks in family trees.
At the Hirasaki National Resource Center at JANM, visitors can search camp rosters and immigration records. Newspapers such as The Rafu Shimpo offer clues in the obituary section in names of decedents, relatives and places of birth. Headstones, carved with family mon can yield valuable information.
Online resources are websites such as ancestry.com, offer free 14-day trials and cost $149 for a one-year subscription. The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints keep meticulous records and administer the website FamilySearch.org, as well as the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, which houses two million rolls of microfilmed records.
The Nikkei Genealogical Society meets monthly; the next meeting is on Saturday, March 24 from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Southern California Genealogical Society 417 Irving Drive, Burbank.
A recent meeting of the Nikkei Genealogical Society (NikkeiGen) at JANM’s Nerio Education Center was led by Melinda Crawford with the warm generosity of a circle of new and old friends, sharing their latest discoveries and research strategies. The society will host its next meeting
“It’s tied to the past, it’s your heritage. It’s the joy of discovery and it motivates you to do more,” Crawford explained.
To RSVP, email Crawford at: info@nikkeigenealogicalsociety.org.