I am Japanese on my moms side; dad is American. I’d occasionally hear stories about about how my grandmothers great grandmother or some such was the wife of a Samurai. I’ve always wanted to see if I could find a record somewhere.
Well, my mom remembered some past family names and now, with an actual name, I may be able to start looking.
I did some looking online, but can’t seem find anything to research foreign (Specifically, Japanese) ancestry.
I’m hoping someone here could give me some advice/ideas on where to start.
Apparently the Mormons want to baptise all their dead relations retrospectively, so they first have to identify them. That means they have the best collection of genealogical material in the world in Salt Lake City.
From what I can tell, most genealogical records in Japan are in the form of koseki, or family registries (similar in idea to family Bibles in the West). You will find very few, if any, on the internet and translated into English. Probably your best bet would be to contact some cousins in Japan and ask for a copy of your koseki, then have it translated.
Agree on getting the Koseki, but have heard that they are harder to get now due to recent changes in privacy law. What is (or at least was as of a few years ago) available will only take you back to the Meiji period (around 1860 or so). We were able to get names and home towns back to late 1700’s by finding parents listed in Meiji era records. Older than that were not available for fear that peolple would find out they were decsended from the “untouchable” castes or the like.
The Mormons are just getting started on the Japanese database, know some of the people here in Utah who are working on it. So, you might get lucky, but it will probably be a while before there is much data available.
To go back further than Meiji, you would probably need to go to temple records where the family is buried. I haven’t done any of that yet.