One Letter Home, One Clan Ledger: The 2026 Migration Memories Journey Sets Out from Sanming

On the morning of 29 October 2026, clan representatives, youth delegates and guests from both sides of the Taiwan Strait gathered in front of the Sanming Municipal Archives in Fujian to open the 2026 Migration Memories ancestral-home journey. The programme runs five days, and its centre of gravity is a very plain word: roots.

Among those at the launch were Huang Yu, president of the Fujian Provincial Taiwan Compatriots Association; Zhou Chengbing, deputy director of the Fujian Provincial Archives; and Huang Guanhua, a member of the Sanming municipal standing committee and president of the city’s overseas friendship association. The event is jointly organised by the Fujian Overseas Friendship Association, the Fujian Provincial Taiwan Compatriots Association, the Fujian Provincial Archives, the Fujian Provincial Surname-Origin Research Association and the radio media centre of the Fujian Broadcasting and Film Group, with the Sanming Taiwan Compatriots Association and the Sanming Municipal Archives as co-organisers.

In his address Huang Yu described kinship culture as a natural bond that brings hearts on both sides closer. The journey, he said, is both a retrospective into shared history and a forward step that continues the relationship. He invited more Taiwan compatriots to take part in preserving Migration Memories archives so that genealogies on both sides can be written further. Huang Guanhua spoke of Sanming’s deep historical ties with Taiwan and hoped more young people from the island would visit and build common ground through shared memory.

The centrepiece of the ceremony was the donation and certification of archival documents. Donors from the island — among them Lin Mingcong, chairman of the Association of Relatives of Taiwan’s Anti-Japanese Patriots and a ninth-generation descendant of the Wufeng Lin family — together with well-wishers from Longhai in Zhangzhou and from Sanming, handed family letters, old photographs and clan genealogies to the Fujian Provincial Archives. These are not abstract historical materials; they are the concrete traces individual families left while crossing the strait.

Two speakers turned the documents into stories. Luo Dexin, secretary-general of the Luo Congyan Memorial Hall in Shaxian, spoke on how the Luo Congyan cultural line has bound Fujian and Taiwan Luo clans for centuries. Li Zezeng, a Taiwan-related family member in Shaxian, brought objects kept at home and told the story of letters that carried both family worry and a nation’s concerns.

The launch also included a hands-on session: delegates tried the Taiwan Root-Seeking Smart Platform, a digital map of ancestry that supports searches of digitised archives, surname-origin queries and clan-lineage tracing. Compared with digging out an old genealogy from a cupboard, digitisation changes the question from whether a record can be found to how quickly it can be found.

After the ceremony participants toured the Chengshou Zhenzhen exhibition on Hakka contract culture, reading the historical ties between Fujian and Taiwan through migration-era documents and deeds. The five-day itinerary also takes in the Wanshouyan National Archaeological Site Park, the Yong’an Fuxing Fort and the Hakka ancestral home at Shibi.

Set in methodological terms, genealogies and archives form a chain of textual evidence that complements Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA testing: a clan ledger supplies the narrative of descent lines, branches and migration, while genetics supplies biological relatedness and admixture proportions. Neither replaces the other. Genealogies have their weak points too — attachment to famous ancestors, missing generations, errors carried by oral transmission — and must be cross-checked against local gazetteers, contract documents and archaeological material. That is precisely where archival digitisation earns its keep: it makes search and cross-comparison possible, and in return demands that every record carry its source and version.

The photograph shows the paifang gateway of the Hakka ancestral home at Shibi in Ninghua County, Fujian. Shibi is regarded as the formative homeland of the Hakka people and the ancestral home of Hakka families, and it is the final stop of this five-day journey. Image: Toutiao