Crowd-sourced Chinese genealogies as a tool for historical demography

This paper introduces a structured approach for using genealogical records from FamilySearch to study Chinese historical demography. As a proof of concept, we focus on over 190,000 digitized records from a single surname, drawn from many provinces and spanning multiple centuries. These lineage-based microdata include individual-level birth, death, and kinship information, which we clean, validate, and geocode using consistent rules and standardized place names. We begin by documenting descriptive patterns in population growth, sex ratios, and migration. Migration was overwhelmingly local, with longdistance moves rare and concentrated in a small number of lineages. Outmigration rose to a high point between 1750 and 1850 and then declined in later cohorts and generations. We then use the genealogical data to test specific hypotheses. Male-biased sex ratios—likely influenced by female infanticide—are strongly associated with higher rates of male childlessness. Migration rates fall sharply with patrilineal generational depth, offering micro-level evidence that clans became more sedentary over time. Together, these findings show how genealogical records can be used to reconstruct long-run demographic patterns and to assess social processes such as kinship, mobility, and reproductive exclusion. The approach is replicable and extensible to other surnames and regions as data coverage improves.