Evergreen Family Story Oral History Project

Evergreen Family Stories of Chinese Immigrants is an oral history initiative dedicated to preserving, sharing, and protecting the stories of Chinese immigrant families for future generations.

Evergreen Family Stories website or Contact Evergreen Family Stories

Over the past several months, we have made significant progress in developing the Evergreen Family Stories platform. Our initial test system is now fully operational, with approximately 50 test users actively recording, preserving, and sharing family stories. Together, they have created approximately 60 oral history videos through solo recordings, one-on-one interviews, and multi-interviewer formats.

Privacy, safety, and family ownership are at the heart of the project. Interviewees retain control over their recordings and decide who may view or share their stories. Permissions can be changed or revoked at any time. Administrative safeguards have also been implemented to detect misuse and suspend accounts involved in illegal, abusive, or harmful activities, helping us maintain a safe and trustworthy environment.

Early testing has also helped us improve the experience for older users, validate our privacy and sharing systems, and address the technical demands of securely storing video. Our next phase will expand testing to 100–150 families, introduce guided interview prompts, improve archive browsing, and prepare the platform for public beta.

For Our Donors

Behind every recording is more than a story. It is a parent’s journey, a grandparent’s voice, a family’s sacrifice, and a piece of history that may disappear if no one takes the time to preserve it. There is a window of opportunity to capture these voices while they are still here to tell us, in their own words, what they lived, loved, lost, and hoped for. Your support helps ensure that decades from now, a child or grandchild will still be able to hear that voice, see that face, and know where their family came from. Together, we can preserve not only the history of Chinese immigrants in America, but the deeply human stories that give that history meaning.