How an Ottawa journalist found my lost family village

It’s been a revelatory couple of weeks. In this post, I’ll share the story of how I learned that Ottawa journalist and jazz pianist Peter Hum is my cousin, and how he solved the mystery of my lost maternal family village.

Peter contacted me two days before his story was to be published in PostMedia on 24 Jan 2025: running concurrently in The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, and other urban centres. I can’t now recall who else sent me personal emails or texts, but it was lovely to know so many in my circle thought of me when they saw it.

The story, Finding my village: How I retraced my ancestors’ journey from Ottawa to China and back, is a long, luxurious, weekend-style read. In it, Peter told the story of his own journey of discovery, of tragedy and unknown faces, of the Canadian Chinese under the repressive Exclusion Act, and – the best part – documented every step of the way. Peter anticipated every question I had: How did you find out? Where did you learn that? What did you do next? Where did you go? His journey began with a visit to the Chinese Canadian Museum, Vancouver, and culminated in a trip to his family villages in Guangdong. He took a similar trip to the one I did in 2019, under the guidance of professors Henry Yu, UBC, and Selia Tan, Wuyi University.

I enjoyed his story throughly, drinking coffee and munching breakfast. Peter’s journey, while unique in details, was similar to my own and thousands of others. Where do we come from? is a common question amongst the diaspora. Peter’s family emigrated to Ottawa, mine to Vancouver, he’s a Hum and I’m a Yip, but our roots are the same. We hunger to know the details.

Excellent piece, I thought. I sent Peter congratulatory messages and thought the story was over.

In fact, it was just getting started. The next day, Peter asked if I knew a particular professor at UBC. I said she was a maternal cousin. That’s when the other shoe dropped. Peter is her cousin, and that makes him my cousin, or to be more accurate, my second cousin once removed. His grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers. The Chu/Xu/徐 maternal village he explored is my maternal village.

He wrote:

The front door to my mother’s family’s ancestral home was missing. The roof behind it was gone too. Stepping through the abandoned brick building’s doorway, we needed to watch our footing as we tiptoed through an obstacle course of overgrown plants, broken beams and debris. We turned into a room with its roof intact, wooden tables on a dirt-covered floor and woven baskets on high shelves.

Peter Hum, Finding my village, 24 Jan 2025, The Ottawa Citizen

Why am I so stunned? This happens all the time, right? Or at least, often enough not to feel such shock? I feel like I’ve seen a ghost. It’s due to this story: Peter found the village I was told disappeared in the 1970s.

In 1976, a big group of Chinese Canadians travelled to Guangdong. Among them were my uncles, hoping to see their paternal village. They came home disappointed, told by the guide that their village had been swallowed by the City of Guangzhou. It was under a shopping mall, or something. Forty-three years later when I went to China, I confirmed with my family there was no trace of the Chu/ 徐’s home village, and I had no more clues to go on.

It’s odd to think but there are more tools available to genealogists today than there were fifty years ago. There are also more records available than there were in 2019. Thanks to The Paper Trail, led by curator Catherine Clement, the Chinese community petitioned Library and Archives Canada to open a set of records previously restricted. These records, a cross between immigration and the census, registered every Chinese man, woman, and child in Canada 1923-24. They are the Chinese Immigration no. 44 records, and since 1 Jul 2023 you can find them on Ancestry, Canada, Chinese Exclusion Act Records, 1923-1947, and Heritage Canadiana, Chinese immigration records : C.I. 44 forms and indexes. With those and other records, Peter found the maternal village he didn’t know, and in the finding, mine as well.

Here is Beicun Village, Baiyun District, Guangzhou (广州白云区北村). Click on the images to see them larger.

Images of the Chu family home, Beicun Village, Baiyun District, Guangzhou, 2024, by Peter Hum, used with permission.

Since the article a little over two weeks ago, Peter and I have gotten to know each other. We’ve swapped family stories, shared records and research, and asked the kinds of oddball questions only genealogists ask their family. I learned that he’s a pretty fabulous jazz pianist, in addition to being a journalist with a discerning palate. One of his good friends is my paternal cousin, Robert Yip.

Both of us are exploring our shared family stories and reaffirming we are all more connected than we imagine.

Thank yous

Thank you to my new cousin, Peter Hum, for sharing the stories behind the stories.