My paternal grandfather, Wong Hing Chong (aka Wong Yep Cheung), was born in 1861 Baisha town (白沙镇), a township in Taishan city (台山市) in Guangdong province, China. He died in Phoenix, Arizona, ca 1930.
I’m lucky to know this because in 2008, my Uncle Bobby, (my father’s youngest brother, Robert B. Wong), spent considerable time doing family research at the National Archives in San Francisco. Uncle Bobby was researching his father’s (my paternal grandfather’s) paper trail of documentation for travel to China from the US. Wong Hing Chong had a general store and lived in Clifton, Arizona. It wasn’t a trivial thing, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act of 1892.
My father, Honki L. Wong, was the oldest son of the eight children of Wong Hing Chong. My father had four brothers, John, Joe, Jimmy and Bobby and three sisters, Frances, and Rose.
This is part of the text of the summary that Uncle Bobby wrote for us:
“Evidently, our father (grandfather, great grandfather, etc.) immigrated to the United States in 1882, which was the year the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. According to Joseph Sanchez, Archives Technician who assisted me in the research, Dad probably arrived just before the Exclusion Act was implemented (passed in 1882 and initially enforced from 1882 thru 1884). Before the Act, foreigners, including Chinese, needed very little documentation to come to the US; they literally just walked off the boat. This must have been the situation with Dad. There is no information on which ship he came on, or other information prior to 1906 since many records were destroyed in an Angel Island fire in 1884. So Dad’s sojourn begins in 1906 when he applied for permission to go back to China for a visit.“