RootsTech 2016 | Paula Madison (Keynote)

good morning so why am I here I've never been here before but one of the real reasons why I'm here is to let you know from one person's experience how you have changed my life I learned about familysearch.org three years ago when I was trying to find my Chinese family Chinese family you don't look Chinese I am Hakka I want to do one thing and then I'm gonna show you a short film very short but you're distracted Chinese what so I like to do this I like to take off my glasses you look at my face past the skin color past the hair and you decide for yourself she looked Chinese and then you'll stop wondering and then you'll listen to me all right I'm gonna start this way here I go oh she does kind of look Chinese I'm gonna be back in a minute in two minutes actually to tell you my story and to tell you that that is the very first time I have ever been interviewed by a big burly motorcycle rider and I can't wait to have it happen again so I'll be back in just a few minutes this is a trailer from the documentary that my brothers and I shot about our search to find our Chinese grandfather's family in China and I'm going to tell you how it would never have been possible if not for you I'll be right back oh we roll the tape part this and part that we have to know where we're from the best we might be able to do as a descendants of slaves is possibly go back to maybe three generations and that's about as far as we can go I am NOT defined by slavery we are not it was a moment in time of a very very very long legacy of africanist we all grew up in Harlem New York my parents settled on Arthur Street in Amsterdam Avenue which I read later achieve some level of notoriety is being statistically the worst block in New York City we felt an inherent danger in neighborhoods because we were we would looked at you know as other things only because we have a Chinese mother my grandfather's name is Samuel Lowe my grandmother was Jamaican my grandfather was Chinese my mother told me she last saw her father when she was young he left for China and never came back I decided that I would just put out an outloud petition to my Jamaican family can you all help me find my Chinese grandfather my cousin John Hall he said oh there are a lot of Chinese Jamaicans in Toronto for the Hakka conference so I said to my brothers were going to this they're like okay the hotdogs traveled from the north and are the migratory tribe and they are the adventurers and our theme many places and the one people I was stunned out of my mind when Carol said that her truck pulled her family's history goes back to 600 BC and I thought what if my family has this is a mother and then a dancer was taken back to China with her father Sam lo our grandfather would have come here yes it is enough our people what travelled the length and breadth of the world this is more than I ever hoped for they knew that this was going to be emotional but so what what it was going to be was the fulfillment of my dream my goal my husband said when you find these Chinese people in your family what are you expecting to happen my husband said you know you're black I know I'm black I expect that because I'm their family and they're my family we'll be family the adventure that we're taking to China it's like a dream come true to finally find some people who are related to me I knew that I am a low and they will want me as much as I want them meet my mother do you see any resemblance I didn't when I was a child I didn't think I looked like my mother at all and I'm not sure that I do now but my mother and my grandfather was separated when she was three years old in Jamaica because my grandfather's Chinese family had decided this guy's not coming back to China so they sent him a Chinese wife a Chinese bride to marry sight-unseen and then he went to my grandmother and said I would like to raise our daughter with my Chinese wife oh no you don't and so there was another African Jamaican partner by the name of Emma Allison it was her house where you saw us walking through the gravestones the tombstones the graves there and she was nicer than my grandmother because she said okay so their two children were actually raised by our grandfather and his Chinese wife my grandmother decided that what she was going to do was keep my mother and her father apart for the rest of their lives and that's exactly what she did you can't do that to families you can't separate them and expect that people will come out whole and happy so my mother spent most of her life depressed and then she married my father my mother had emigrated to the United States to Harlem where she had family and she became a single mother in Harlem with three children and you see what we look like you see what my mother looks like I can tell you in so many ways it was interesting growing up in Harlem it was okay until our mother showed up and she'd come outside and people would say who is that and sometimes it would turn out to be okay and sometimes we'd get into fights I want to show you some pictures from my family my Chinese family and my Jamaican American African black Chinese family so the story that I want to tell you and how it relates to you is that in June of 2012 as you heard in that film we went to the haka conference in Toronto the haka people are a cultural minority in China and around the world they number 70 to 80 million in China that's a minority and they have a conference every four years in Toronto Canada and while I was searching for any kind of clue my cousin John Hall who you saw said oh the Hakka people in Toronto have told me to tell you that every four years as a conference you should come so we went six weeks later I was in China meeting my 94 year old anta dasa and my 87 year old uncle jalwa who never knew my mother existed and how did I find them when I left that conference in Toronto my older brother Howard and I were at the Toronto Airport and I'd learned from a representative a familysearch at the conference we have a database you should just go in and type in whatever information you have so I sitting at the Toronto Airport in the American Airlines lounge and I typed in Samuel Lowe Kingston Jamaica Guangdong China 1934 and in seconds the manifest of the SS Adrastus the passenger list came up and there was there was my grandfather's name and the name of his Chinese wife and his youngest daughters leaving Jamaica for the last time to go to Hong Kong and I couldn't breathe my mother hadn't seen him nor knew and known anything about him in decades in a lifetime and in seconds you all solved the mystery in our family and I'm here because I want to thank you I want you to know that if you ever wondered who benefits from this I'm not a member of your church I'm not I'm a novice to this conference and yet someone from family search said try this and what I learned last night was that it was just months before that this database was actually uploaded it changed my life forever because what happened was when I saw my grandfather's name and I recovered was a five-hour flight to Los Angeles from Toronto and by the time I landed a colleague of mine to whom I had emailed this information she went on and looked at the rest of the manifest and saw that there were more people in the Lowe clan who were on this ship and by the time I landed she had researched even more and found the 1927 ships passenger list so to make the short this very long story somewhat short what ultimately happened was I was welcomed into the family along with my brothers and our offspring so 20 of us black Chinese went to China and we gathered with 300 of my grandfather's direct descendants who assembled in Guangzhou China to welcome us into the family we children who had no family we had grown up in Harlem with no aunts no uncle's no cousins an occasional our father was in and out of our lives we were alone people and you all solved the mystery for us of where do I come from Who am I related to what's my lineage what's my culture so here's the answer we got to Guangzhou they drove us to Shenzhen where our ancestral village is located los we hop and lo sweet hop has been there for hundreds of years maybe since the late seventeen hundreds and what we learned was I am the one hundred and fifty first generation of the löwe clan my family's documented lineage I understand that in mandarin it says it's called a jaw pool in cantonese it's a chuck pool our documented lineage goes back 3,000 years I can trace my Chinese family to the Year 1006 and this Chuck poo when I learned of it and I learned of our ancestry I said oh now that you know of my mother can my mother be included and they were like oh well women are kind of parenthetical to this it's the wives the mothers the daughters the sisters but women are not really included I'm not really good at accepting defeat so that was in August of 2012 by the time we went back in December the Chuck pool was edited and so my mother and her line are included in the Chuck pool so I in my enthusiasm said yay now black people are included in the Chuck pool for the first time and my cousin who was racially the opposite of me I'm 3/4 black and one-quarter Chinese he is 3/4 Chinese in one quarter black and translating by our cousin he said black people have been in the Chuck pool all along my mother is black and I was like and so what you see here these pictures that you're going to that you're looking at our compilation of various celebrations I know many of you at teetotalers but Jamaicans in Chinese we imbibe quite a bit so a lot of what we do is around celebrate and that's my husband and that's our grandson these two women are my first cousins the one with the sunglasses on in the back is also a first cousin that's my great nephew and he was the youngest of us who travelled to China every person who was descended from my mother went to China and every one of us was welcomed now my uncle Jawa is the person who when he received this email as I was pursuing I I need to find them and and my cousin who turned out to be the co-chair of that conference his name is Keith Lowe and I went to him and I said you're the first Chinese Jamaican I've ever met who's got the same last name as my grandfather and my mother can you help me no no I've never heard of them I don't know them I've never heard of them so with the harassment what did happen was within about three weeks he says I'm going to contact my nephew in Hong Kong and ask him to ask the family in mainland China has anyone heard of a Samuel Lowe 24 hours later the email comes back my uncle says Samuel Lowe was his father you got the ball rolling and in less than six weeks I was no longer lost I was no longer floating in air I was grounded and most importantly most importantly to me was when that happened my mother was claimed when that happened my mother became a part of the family you see that that's our family tree on the wall in our ancestral village and so what I think is important for me to share with you is that in no time these mysteries can be solved tonight you all are helping so many more of us who are of African descent with the database that you're going to upload from the Freedmen's Bureau I go to China all the time in fact I'm leaving for China tonight last night we showed a the shortened version of my documentary which is an hour the longer one is 90 minutes and I was going to stay here just a bit longer but the star of that film for the people saw it last night and for those who didn't see it it's going to show here again on Saturday but the star of that film is my Uncle Joe will our family patriarch who was an amazing man and was so excited that I could tell the story of his father's journey from China to Jamaica and how all of these children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren came to be around different continents my uncle let's see if I can do this here this is a gathering at the luncheon where we all got together for the first time but my Uncle Joe wool he died on Sunday at the age of 91 and is the closest thing to a grandfather I've ever had and for just a short second I thought well maybe what I should do is bow out of the conference because I have to get to China to honor him and then I realized that's the last thing my uncle wouldn't want me to do so my brothers and cousins from all around the world have gathered they've been we chatting I'm in China I'm in Hong Kong I've arrived so I'm leaving here and I'm going to arrive in China four hours before his funeral begins and I'm here because I want to validate to you and my uncle would want me to validate to you that family is family it doesn't matter the race of the family if you look at this photo this thank you if you look at this photo this woman here second from the right is my aunt Anita Maria she is the youngest of my grandfather's children she's racially Chinese born in Jamaica and lives her life spans her time between Guangzhou and Melbourne Australia this is the youngest of my uncle Gilbert's children he had ten so he and my mother were the two children who were not taken to China by our grandfather and that's because when I learned of my uncle Gilbert and that he wasn't taken he's the darkest of all of the children he's biracial and his skin color was about mine and being a child of the United States I presumed that the reason why he was left behind was because he was darker skinned I'm ashamed to say that that's what I thought but that's the context in which I was raised I got to China and my auntie dasa no no that's not why why because whole Sui in the Chinese wife said leave him to be first son for his mother I'm going to have my own first son's you know the significance of first sons and in Chinese culture the first son is responsible for the elders for the parents so the first son and the first son's wife knows that the parents will live with them there is no question about what's going to happen with mom and dad in China the firstborn son has that responsibility if you go back to the other picture the other photo the one right before then the point that I want to show you is that these people are all either children grandchildren and the two gentlemen here four great-grandchildren of Samuel Lowe his name is loading Chow that's really his Chinese name look at the racial characteristics of these two guys this is my oldest brother who by the way is now the oldest grandson he's got a lot of power in the family and this is the second oldest grandson Chi Minh Chi Minh is the racial opposite of Elric my brother three quarters african-american three quarters black and one-quarter Chinese three quarters Chinese in one quarter black look at their skin tone what difference does race make there's me over here I wish that my hair had been better here's me and this is my uncle Gilbert's daughter we are the same racial mixture this is my grandfather's great-granddaughter whose racially Chinese and in this room are another two hundred lows and we came in such ranges of color but we all were one big family you probably have questions I hope you do but we don't have time to take them so what I'd like to say to you is that we're going to have a webinar on February 17th I'll be back from China by then and we'll answer whatever questions you'd like but the you can find the information about it on the Africa Channel web page or the Facebook page this is a picture that we took when we first met this is my favorite picture of all time because in that photo as you can see she is my honored Asus oldest daughter this is my aunty dasa one month younger than my mother yeah you all should understand know and then you begin to see that these people this is my mother's sister my mother's sister my mother's sister my mother's brother my mother's brother in the past year auntie dasa died one year ago uncle joe gong died six months ago he was 87 she was 96 and this is uncle Jawa who just passed this guy here is the one who told me that there were blacks in the chuck pool before before us his name is young man and young man who speaks no English has dubbed me the CEO of cousins I thank you very much for listening to my story I will be here for just a little longer my book which is very different from the film my book is very different from the film as good as being is for sale here but the film is having a special presentation on the Africa channel which full disclosure is a television network that my family owns and then we will have the book here at Mayas books they're signed and then the DVD and if you order the DVD actually I shot a completely second documentary which gathers all the cousins from all around the world and we're roaming and tracing our grandfather's footsteps and we talk more about family search and what it did for us in that documentary and most importantly and most especially I hope that what I'm serving today is not this amorphous somebody out there is being helped I hope that what you'll take away from this is an understanding enough that allows you to see that I am one of those millions of nameless faceless people who are wandering the planet searching for our family and our roots and I thank God for you because if not for you I'm not sure where I would be today I will be headed to China tonight I'm grateful to you and my family is very grateful thank you you

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 43,924

Rating: 4.936204 out of 5

Keywords: rootstech, familysearch, rootstech 2016, genealogy, family history, familysearch genealogy, genealogy research

Id: oKKdGFGTgms

Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2016