Roots Companion 尋根
Chinese-American name decoder
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Your grandfather's name was not his name. 陳 became Chin in one family and Chan
in another; 譚 became Hom; 司徒 became Soo Hoo. This decodes the difference.
A photocopied file arrives from the National Archives. The applicant is "Lee Tah
Fu". A related paper says "S.N.D." The village is on no map you can find. You
read English and some Mandarin, and none of it connects.
It does not connect because the name was written down by an English-speaking
clerk listening to a dialect he did not speak, using no standard at all. It was
usually Toisanese, which no romanization system was ever built for — so Pinyin
will never find it.
WORK OUT HOW THE NAME WAS SPELLED
Type Chinese characters and see the spellings a clerk might have written; type a
spelling from a record and see which characters it could be. 陳 is Chan in a Hong
Kong family and Chin in a Toisan one. 譚 became Hom. 司徒 became Soo Hoo. These
are sound rules, not errors, and the app runs them both ways — with spellings
found in real records kept separate from the ones it derived. Hear the two read
aloud, which is how one family ended up with two spellings.
READ WHAT YOU ARE HOLDING
Photograph a page, including a Chinese one. It reads Traditional and Simplified,
says which part is a date, a name, a village or a relationship, and marks the
lines it was unsure of. 光緒二十三年 is 1897. Fifty terms of Exclusion-era
vocabulary, the forty questions a Board of Special Inquiry asked, and 字輩
generation poems decoded into the siblings to search for.
How to read a 族譜 page and a gravestone — the ancestral village is carved at the
top right. Twenty-nine kinship terms, because 堂兄 and 表兄 are both "cousin" in
English and only one shares your surname and your clan book.
ASK THE RIGHT ARCHIVES
Which facility holds the file, and a request letter filled in from what you
saved. At six weeks with no reply the app says so and drafts the follow-up. And
one thing nothing else will tell you: San Francisco holds the Angel Island files
and has described none of them, so searching returns nothing and means nothing.
A-files and C-files never went to the National Archives at all — they stay with
USCIS, and asking takes two steps: an index search that says which files exist,
then a request for what it found. When the reply comes, paste it: the app finds
the file numbers and reads whether anything was located.
WHEN THERE IS NO FILE
Six reasons one may not exist — he never travelled again, he arrived before
1882, the district's records burned — and what survives instead. A negative
result is a finding, and almost never because you searched badly.
THE OTHER SIDE
僑批 — the letters sent home, and the replies in which those who stayed speak. 執骨, which is why an emigrant is often buried twice. Village names
split into their parts, so "Sun Gow Chung" is 新 plus one unknown syllable plus 村.
WHAT THE RECORDS LEAVE OUT
Women, barred by the Page Act in 1875 — seven years before the men — and recorded
as 氏 plus a father's surname, with no given name at all. When one of your
records carries such a name, the app says what it means and what to search
instead. The interpreter, the third person in every interrogation.
KEEP THE RESEARCH
Saved people, a dated log of what you wrote and what came back, photographs, and
one file that backs up all of it. Compare two records, and merge them when they
prove to be one man. A citation for every record — repository, record group,
file, and the day you saw it — so somebody else can check your work. A GEDCOM
from Ancestry or FamilySearch opens here too, and nobody saved is overwritten.
Everything in English and Chinese, Traditional or Simplified. Everything works
offline, with no account and no server of ours: nothing you type is sent to us
or to anybody else. Saved people sync through your own iCloud if you have it on.
WHAT IT IS NOT
Not a records database. It helps you read what you already have and know who to
write to for the rest. On 24 historical names it had never been tuned against,
the true archival spelling appears in the first ten candidates for 79% of names.
Roughly one name in five will not surface, and the app says so.
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The developer, Yiwen Luo, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
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Information
- Seller
- Yiwen Luo
- Size
- 7.6 MB
- Category
- Reference
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Yiwen Luo