Chinese Genealogy Books

A jiapu is a multigenerational family record maintained by a Chinese clan. The genealogy typically begins with a description of the first ancestor—who he was, where he lived, what he did—and continues with his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on.

FamilySearch has more than 65,000 Chinese jiapu on its website. While the individual names in the books have not yet been indexed, you can find Chinese jiapu on FamilySearch using a custom image search.

FamilySearch has more than 65,000 jiapu for use on its website. There are a few possibilities why you might not have found yours:

• You are looking at the jiapu from the wrong place. Try searching for either a more or less specific place.
• We may not have your clan's jiapu. Try using other online jiapu collections at the Shanghai Library and the National Library of China.
• Your clan's jiapu may not be online, or it may no longer exist.

You can search for jiapu using information that is commonly included in jiapu, including the honored ancestor, ancestral hall, keyword, and generation poem.

• Honored ancestor. The first member of the clan.
• Ancestral hall. The clan’s place of origin.
• Generation poem. A sequence of words that are prescribed for use in the names of all men in a clan who are born in the same generation. The poem can be used to figure out how closely 2 people from the same clan are related.
• Keyword. Any word in the FamilySearch catalog that is in the notes, series, subjects, statement of responsibility, authors, or title field.

Not necessarily. The ancestral home is your clan’s place of origin. You may not have been born in that place.

When you search for Chinese jiapu, the search results are shown on a map. The map pins represent the number of jiapu that FamilySearch has from that area of China.

At Explore Historical Images, you search through digitized images rather than indexed information. For more information, see the knowledge article Why does Explore Historical Images not have a name field?

Yes, you can download jiapu images.

1. Find the vertical tool bar to the left of the image, and click   (Tools).
2. A drop-down menu appears. Click  (Download).

For more information, see How do I download historical record images?

Many jiapu cover more generations of a family's history than will fit in one book.

The option to display different volumes of the jiapu is on the right side of the screen, in the side sheet,

In the panel on the right side of the screen, click Advanced Search to toggle it on.

With the Advanced Search options, you can refine the place and search using honored ancestor, ancestral hall, keywords, or the generation poem.

1. Turn on the the Advanced Search options.
2. Scroll down the panel until you see the Keywords field.
3. Enter words you could expect to find on the cover of a book that contains the information you need.

Tip: You can use the operators AND and OR in the Keyword field. To work as described in the knowledge article in the link below, the words AND and OR must be typed in English in all capital letters.


For more information, see Tips for using the Keyword field in Explore Historical Images.

Yes. In addition to a large collection of Chinese jiapu, FamilySearch has other types of Chinese genealogy records, such as biographies, cemetery records, census records, death records, periodicals, and so forth. You can find all of these records using our Explore Images feature. To find them, see How do I search all Chinese record collections, not just the jiapu?