Chamorro Roots Genealogy Project: Technological Milestones

Abstract

With the advent of technology, the Chamorro Roots Genealogy Project has evolved from a personal family project into a CHamoru peoples’ project with a database containing over 344,000 names and globally accessible over the internet. The technological presence is not only for CHamoru-specific genealogists. Its accessibility is also important for an ever-growing CHamoru diaspora population of over 147,798 in the United States, where the majority of the CHamoru population now resides. In this paper, I will discuss some of the Project’s history, technological tools to network, communicate, and collaborate on the Project’s data. This includes the publication of the transcribed 1920 and 1930 Census of Guam with observational comments. The essay concludes with a brief observation of methods, use and results of social media as a key collaborating mechanism that is the genesis for further developing a comprehensive index of CHamoru family clan names and a first name-nickname dictionary. The global accessibility of these resources produced from this Project will continue to add to the availability of CHamoru genealogy resources locally and abroad. More importantly, perhaps it will provide a key data-mining resource for scholars to review and interpret data that will enable another aspect to the knowledge-base of CHamoru history from a genealogical lens.

Keywords

• Chamorro
• <i>CHamoru</i>
• Guam
• CNMI
• genealogy
• roots
• Austronesian
• Micronesian
• Pacific Islander
• indigenous knowledge