Library and Archives Canada recognizes Genealogy for Asian Canadians

I was pleased to see Genealogy for Asian Canadians¹ recognized by Library and Archives Canada as part of Asian Heritage Month 2026.² In its feature, LAC noted that it received 15 documents from Genealogy for Asian Canadians, that this work added nearly 130,000 records to the Immigrants from China database, and that its data team then made more than 300,000 corrections and additions. Most importantly, LAC stated what that means for families: relatives and future generations will now be able to find family members in the archival records more easily.

This recognition matters. It is a meaningful public acknowledgment that community researchers and volunteers can improve the national archival record in practical ways. It matters because it touches a record set of real importance to researchers. As Robert Louie wrote in a 2023 guest post on this site, C.I.9 records can help document travel, family connections, and, in some cases, preserve rare early photographs of ancestors.³ He said that the broader C.I.9 effort grew out of the need to make these reels more usable and searchable for descendants and researchers.

The story behind the story

The public recognition names Genealogy for Asian Canadians as a group. Many people contributed time, skill, and persistence to the work. Volunteers helped create, review, and improve the data that ultimately made these changes possible. At the same time, the work didn’t only happen at one level.

A dedicated team of volunteers over three years

The scale is easy to underestimate. The corrections and additions included work on the General Register of Chinese Immigration dataset, including corrected serial numbers and names, the addition and correction of C.I.5 and C.I.30 numbers, and the addition of missing data to more than 97,000 records with blank fields, including C.I.4 numbers, place of registration, gender, and ship information. The work also included extensive review of C.I.44 records, where tens of thousands of forms required multiple corrections to names, C.I. numbers, parent identifiers, and native-born status. In addition, the new data prepared for ingestion included approximately 87,000 later C.I.9 forms, 24,000 C.I.36 register entries, and 14,000 C.I.28 register entries.⁴

In 2023, Robert Louie described the beginnings of the C.I.9 Transcription Project and explained that the result was a searchable Google Sheets spreadsheet built from indexed data drawn from the C.I.9 reels. He described the project as an effort to make the records more discoverable by matching names, C.I. numbers, and related identifying information so that descendants could more reliably locate the correct person. By December, the Vancouver and Victoria material alone involved 32 reels and 87,137 images online, with more than 51,000 images already completed by the team at that point.

A project like this can be summarized as “data correction,” but the summary loses the impact. This was a project of advocacy, care, and interpretation. It relied on the willing labour of ordinary citizens noticing what institutions had overlooked, explaining why it matters, and continuing the work long after the first conversation. It needed subject matter expertise, diplomacy, project management, and so many volunteer hours. And finally, it was a project based on trust: that the work would eventually make a difference.

The GFAC advisory committee

Alongside the wider volunteer effort, a smaller advisory team worked with Library and Archives Canada over time to explain the missing context, press for change, and help shape the work as it developed. In our case, that work unfolded over time. It involved correspondence, data, meetings, follow-up, and repeated efforts to not only explain why these records mattered, but also to get the project completed. It also led to a Letter of Support and to work toward a memorandum of understanding before budgetary constraints brought that part of the process to a halt in December 2025. Even unfinished work matters. It shows the seriousness of the engagement and the possibility of a different relationship between community researchers and the national archives.

Thank yous

I am grateful to Library and Archives Canada for recognizing Genealogy for Asian Canadians publicly. Community work of this kind is never the result of one person. I am equally grateful to the many volunteers whose work improved the records, and to those who worked in advisory and project roles at different stages along the way.

Afterword

For those of us who care about archival records, this moment is worth celebrating. Better records do not happen by accident. They happen because people decide that accuracy, context, and access are important, and they give their time to make them better. This recognition is welcome not only because it celebrates an achievement, but also because it acknowledges that communities themselves can help reshape the archives.

If you see something that needs fixing in your community, you can do something about it. The people closest to the work know it best. The work might be slow, persnickety, and unglamorous, but it is work that will live beyond us to all current and future researchers. That, my friends, is work worth cheering.

This post was written by Linda Yip with the assistance of ChatGPT. Robert Louie contributed project details and context about the data work behind the C.I. records project.

References

1. Genealogy for Asian Canadians, Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1923544271050858 accessed May 5, 2026. ↩︎
2. Library and Archives Canada, “Asian Heritage Month 2026: Honouring Asian Canadians: Stories that Built Canada,” Canada.ca: https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives/corporate/updates/2026/asian-heritage-month-2026.html, accessed May 5, 2026. ↩︎
3. Robert Louie, “Why Do We Care about the C.I.9s? – a Guest Post by Robert Louie,” Past Presence, December 16, 2023. ↩︎
4. Thanks to Robert Louie for the statistics. ↩︎