ALBANY — When Amy Chin began digging for traces of her family history, the only clue she had was an old ship manifest showing her grandfather’s arrival to the U.S. in 1911 — well into the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the immigration of all Chinese laborers for six decades.
A lifelong resident of New York City, she didn’t expect the trail to lead north, to the far-flung reaches of New York that border Canada. And she didn’t expect that her discovery would unearth a different story — that her grandfather had actually come eight years earlier, entering the country not by ship but on foot.
After hitting a wall while hunting for archival records, Chin reached out to a community historian in Essex County and learned about some books that apparently no one had asked to look at before. They had been donated to the local historical society by her uncle, the historian said, after he retrieved them from a neighbor who was about to throw them away…