Chihiro Harper Offers Nearby Expertise for Far-Flung Research

A visitor to the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah might be surprised when a woman of Japanese descent comes to assist them with German research—especially since she may have just come from helping a guest translate some Japanese records into English. But she is capable of both—and more.

Skilled consultants at the FamilySearch Library can offer excellent assistance in many areas and languages. Among them, Chihiro Harper is a woman of many talents who can provide such help in several far-flung places and languages.

Her path to such broad expertise was anything but direct

Chihiro didn’t begin library service with all those skills. In fact, when she began working at the library 8 years ago, she knew nothing about family history research and almost nothing about the FamilySearch Library. Her path to her broad expertise was anything but direct.

As a young adult, she came to the United States from Japan to attend college at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. While assisting with a Japanese language class at USU, she met another student who had just returned from 23 months in Japan.

They courted, married, and started a family. Through the years, her family was her focus. She spent time with her children, volunteered at the schools, and supported her kids in their extracurricular activities. After her youngest son graduated from high school, he was called to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where he would speak Hmong. He wanted to go through the Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah, before he left, so Chihiro and he drove there. The temple was closed that day. They decided to cross the street and visit the Family History Library (now called the FamilySearch Library) to see what records might be available in Hmong.

They were greeted by Brother Lemon, a missionary consultant who offered his assistance. They discovered that there were few records in Hmong. Chihiro told Brother Lemon that she knew nothing about genealogy, did not intend to do it, and was not at all interested in it. They had just come as a curiosity since they were in the neighborhood. But Brother Lemon recognized the potential value of Chihiro’s native Japanese language skills at the library.

The library has no policy to recruit visitors to become consultants, but Brother Lemon made an exception in her case. He gave her the papers needed to sign up and suggested she think about it and take the papers to her stake president (an ecclesiastical leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). “Did you not hear me say I have no interest in genealogy?” she thought, but politely took the papers with her anyway.

Since her children were grown and the last was leaving home, she had been considering ways to serve. She had some ideas, but genealogy was nowhere on her list. However, after making it a matter of prayer, she felt that she was needed at the library and followed through with the sign-up process.

“I went through training at the library. They had to begin with the very basics. I didn’t even have a FamilySearch account and I had never even heard about Ancestry [or other well-known genealogy sites]. Sister Lemon patiently helped me to navigate,” she chuckled.

“Few Japanese guests came in and a number of people in the library spoke Japanese, so I wasn’t very busy,” she said. She noticed that many people were coming for help with German research. “I am bored,” she thought. “Maybe I can pick up [some skills] and be of some help.”

She began by studying cursive German. Older German handwritten records can be difficult to decipher. She transcribed what she found into a spiral notebook and filled all the pages. “I got forms to see if I could translate it. I used Google Translate. Then I took the work to our experts to see if it was accurate,” she said. Fritz Juengling was offering a German genealogy class at the library and suggested she enroll. She became skilled at helping guests research and interpret German records.

Then she began to expand her skills. “Oh,” she thought, “Swiss might be fun. It’s similar to German,” and “I need some Austrian-German training—it is similar, but some words are totally different.” She went to work to learn and has since also learned to decipher records of the Netherlands.

“When I go to help people with German research, they look at me tentatively and say, ‘I need German help.’ I say, ‘Let’s look at these documents and see what we can do.’ I like doing this. It’s challenging. I like to use maps in research, too. It’s fun to find places where people lived and learn what their lives might have been like,” she explained. The things she finds help guests understand what their family’s circumstances might have been.

For example, one woman’s death record said she died in a ditch. The guest and Chihiro were looking at the area on a map and saw where the ditch might have been. “Maybe she was washing radishes from the field and fell in and couldn’t get out,” Chihiro suggested.

The guest could relate to that possibility. “Oh,” she said, “I have that ditch by my house. My mother was walking with my little boy, and they both fell in. They couldn’t get out. People typically don’t walk there, but on that day, someone was passing by and stopped to help rescue them.”

Some Japanese, especially second and third generation Japanese, cannot read the language, but Chihiro can. Names, dates, and places are the key items needed to create a genealogy, but Chihiro likes to help people know the person those details are attached to. Out of the kindness of her heart, she transcribes the records as written in Japanese and includes a translation for them.

Like most volunteers and missionaries, she works at the library for 8 hours a day, 2 days a week. But she puts in extra time on her own. Not a lot of Japanese records have been made available to the library, but through her own experience, she has learned how to acquire them.

A fortuitous gathering of family records 30 years earlier

Thirty years ago, as a new member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she knew little about her family. “But I had a feeling that I needed to collect all my family’s records. It was as if someone was telling me I needed to do this now. I did nothing with the records—I just held on to them. I didn’t know how to get them. I had to call and ask the places where they were stored how to do it. It took time, but I learned from that,” she remembers.

Gathering her family’s records 30 years ago turned out to be fortuitous. The Japanese registry started in the mid-1870s, so documentation has gone back only 153 years. However, the law requires documents to be kept for just 80 years—so earlier records have been destroyed, she explained. A person can search out Buddhist records as another option, but those only list the new name given to people upon their death and the date of death. And records are in the places where the events took place. There is no general registry, she explained. “And in some cases, masses of records were destroyed, such as in Hiroshima, Okinawa, and Tokyo during the bombings of World War II. It was terrible. Okinawa was flattened,” she said.

Gathering vital records documents from Japan takes time. To get them, the applicant must be a direct line descendent and provide proofs of descent—like birth, marriage, and death certificates of themselves, parents, and perhaps grandparents. These require translation from English into Japanese before being mailed to the proper entity, and then when the requested Japanese documents are returned by mail to Chihiro, she transcribes and translates them into English.

Out of the goodness of her heart, Chihiro has been able to help people through the procedure. It is a time-consuming process. Returned documents may include whole households. “In reply, I may get 1 document or 25 pages,” she said. The largest reply she has received consisted of about 75 pages. While she could simply extract the necessary names, birth, marriage, and death dates and places, often the documents provide much more information. So, she takes the considerable time needed to transcribe the Japanese characters and their translation so the people she assists can have all the details.

Delving into rare Japanese jiapu (家譜): There's an APP for that

In China, some families traditionally created family descendancy lists – called jiapu (家譜). They extend back hundreds of generations through thousands of years. Nothing like them was created in most of Japan. However, in some areas that are close to the Chinese border, like Okinawa, some families did create jiapus, but they are rare. These Japanese jiapus are a written in a mix of Chinese and Japanese characters. Chihiro can read and understand both and can tell people what the characters mean, but she cannot pronounce the Chinese words. She has found a useful app, Pleco, that helps her pronounce the Chinese words.

“German is much easier to decipher if you can read the writing,” she chuckled.

Helping people gather Japanese records is rewarding to Chihiro. “There is nothing online. You have to physically mail the requests and wait for the reply to come. People appreciate the help to get this. It is more than just names, dates, and places,” she said.

Knowing one’s heritage is important

“Studies show that children who know where they come from have better mental health than those who don’t,” Chihiro noted. She takes her grandkids to cultural events to stimulate interest. They go to Greek festivals as part of a line of her husband’s family. They also go to Japanese and German festivals. Each has a different atmosphere that tells them where they come from. “Give them the cultural event, and something in their DNA remembers it,” she said.

Get help with Japanese research and more

If you want to do your own with Japanese research, get started with the FamilySearch Wiki page, Japanese research methods. The FamilySearch Library includes a staff of people like Chihiro who speak a variety of languages and know how to do research in wide-ranging places. Consultants are available at the library to assist guests in person and can also be reached by making a reservation for online consultations.