Is there any way a person can find out more about their heritage?

Question

is there any way someone can find out about their roots even though their family had only lived in the US since the 1970s? a way to trace roots of a person's family who lived in SE Asia?

Answer 1

Might be tough to find documents but hopefully you have relatives that can help you out.

Answer 2

Many countries, especially in Asia and Africa, do not have records except for the 20th century.  To compound matters, many of those countries did not have standard surnames until late 19th century or even 20th century (Philippines adopted standard surnames about the time of the American Civil War).

So, if you want to trace your heritage, your roots, the paper trail may not go back very far.  My suggestion: DNA.  I went through www.familytreedna.com which shows ancestry from the Philippines, Japan, China, Viet Nam, India and other Asian countries.  I do not know which DNA site would be the best for you, but you might first try Family Tree (for information) and go from there

Answer 3

Not easily. If you went to your family's native country you might be able to find paper records in city halls and churches or temples; you might not.

Most of the genealogy data in the Internet is about Americans and their European roots, followed by people in the UK, Europeans, then Canadians and Australians and their European roots.

I expect that in 10 years there will be a lot more than there is now about people from India, as they get interested.

To accumulate data you need one of two things; volunteers with the time and interest to transcribe data (US Gen Web, Roots Web), or customers with the interest and money to make it lucrative to have it transcribed. (Ancestry.com)

South East Asia doesn't have either of those, yet.