Luso-Asian History Project

We need Volunteers and/or Work-Study Students for
Crowdsourcing Research and Family Studies

“The Portuguese and Macanese Studies Project”, based at U.C. Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI), is looking for Volunteers and Work-Study eligible students who can use search engines, social media, streaming video, digital photography or genealogy platforms. (Watch the Introductory Video.) The project uses these tools to enhance the study of the 500 year old Luso (Portuguese) – Asian community. All work is conducted in English.

Introduction

We began as a blog in January 2012 called: “Far East Currents”, which gathered information, stories, and photos from several thousand Luso-Asians from Macau, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, China, who call themselves “Maquistas” or colloquially, the Macanese. Many migrated with their families since 1945 to the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and several other countries in Europe and Latin America.

Since 2019, the project has documented Macanese communities in over 35 countries, and estimated through surveys that the Luso-Asian and Macanese Diaspora’s global population is more than 1.5 million.  

In 2020 the project’s collected research was published as a printed book/e-book: “The Macanese Chronicles: A History of Luso-Asians in a Global Economy”, a joint publication of Pinto Final Newspapers (Macau) and Amazon Press, and authored by a scholar at U.C. Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI).

The Next Phase – Crowdsourcing Research and Family Studies

In 2021, the project, in association with community historians and archivists in Oakland and San Francisco, began digitally scanning thousands of photos, some from as early as 1830, for its “Macanese Family Tree” database. This database is now available on Ancestry.com through a free subscription. (Explore the site for more information.)

The project will soon be using the photo database to link to documentary materials, such as birth, marriage, and death records, as well as historical research from the diaspora project at ISSI. These materials include text and video on such topics as occupations, businesses, military service, gender roles, local associations, family studies, community development, food, and language.

The final phase will be to promote the database by connecting and distributing the visual and textual information currently on the Ancestry.com database to several hundred social media pages in Asia, Europe, Australia, the United States, and South America.

Project Duties (Supervised by Project Mentors)

We need up to 4 volunteers and/or Work-Study students to:

• Scan photos collected by associates of the ISSI diaspora project, and Upload the photos to the Ancestry.com database. This work can be performed on-line under direction by an associate.

• Under supervision, Search the Family Search database, physically located at the Latter Day Saints archival facilities in North Oakland, to find documents related to Luso-Asian family members, and upload the material to the Ancestry database. This activity is estimated at about 5 hours per week on-site under the direction of an on-site mentor.

• Under supervision, Gather digital documents, organize them according to criteria determined by the project staff, and create digital links to people identified in the Ancestry.com database. This work can be performed on-line under direction.

• Under supervision, the final stage will be to Create promotional links, some involving memes, digital images, videos, and animated GIFs, for the project and the visual and textual database. This work can also be performed on-line under direction.

Interested ? Contact us at: rexavier627@gmail.com