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For Asian Americans, immigration records have yielded a wealth of surprises. From 1882 until 1965, a series of laws severely restricted Chinese immigration. Only a few exempt groups--diplomats, merchants, students and teachers, for example--were allowed in. Byron Yee, a San Francisco actor, had always known his father had changed his surname to Yee from Seto when he emigrated from China, but it wasn't until years later, when he was researching his family for a one-man show, that Yee discovered why. His father had been a "paper son," entering the U.S. with false documents that identified him as the son of a citizen--a common ruse of many Chinese immigrants. Now that he has reviewed his father's interrogation records, he says, "I've recovered some of my lost relationship."
If genealogy is an entertaining hobby, it can also be a matter of life and death. Two years after Washington public affairs specialist Carol Krause graduated from college, her mother died of ovarian cancer. But she and her three sisters did not feel any personal threat--until comedian Gilda Radner's death, when they learned that ovarian cancer can be hereditary. Shortly after that, Carol's sister Susan also came down with ovarian cancer. Interviewing relatives and ferreting out death certificates, the sisters found more than a dozen family members who had died of different cancers. Carol and her other sisters, Peggy and Kathy, were tested for several cancers. Kathy had a microscopic tumor, which was ultimately fatal. Carol and Peggy had preventive hysterectomies. Carol also discovered and was successfully treated for colon and breast cancer. "There's a lot of denial out there," says Krause, who has written a book, How Healthy Is Your Family Tree? "When I go and speak to groups and ask, 'How many of you know what all four of your grandparents died of?', they don't know."
In the days when your relatives mostly stayed put, they knew more about one another's lives and deaths. But in today's mobile society, as nuclear families splinter, loneliness and alienation are the order of the day. "We are witnessing the atomization of the family," says David Altshuler, director of Manhattan's Museum of Jewish Heritage. "The coming of the millennium focuses people's attention on the disappearance of an era." That nostalgia, the sense of lost roots, has fired a thirst for connection that genealogy seems to satisfy. Middle-aged and older people, who form the majority of root seekers, talk about leaving a legacy for their children--a guide to their children's identity, a family deeper and broader than ever imagined. With genealogy, says Hank Jones, a San Diego character actor who writes and lectures on the subject, "you have a feeling of belonging again when, in daily life, sometimes you don't."
--Reported by Melissa August/Washington, Greg Aunapu/Miami, Curtis Black/Chicago, Moira Daly/Toronto, Megan Rutherford/New York and Richard Woodbury/Denver, with other bureaus