Next year marks the 150thanniversary of when large numbers of Chinese started working on a huge project in the United States. They help to build America's first transcontinental railroad between 1863 and 1869, connecting the East Coast with the West. People know little about the Chinese railroad workers and what happened to them after the project was finished. Stanford University in California wants to learn more about the lives of these men by reaching out to their families. Bill Yee's ancestors came from southern China. He said, "My great-great-grandfather came to America during the'gold rush'days and he returned to China as a wealthy man. And then my great-grandfather came to work on the railroad and died there." But that did not stop his grandfather from coming to the US on false papers. He operated a laundry. Bill Yee's father continued to run the business and has never returned to China. "Things were pretty bad in some parts of China in the 1860's. They came to America at all costs in order that they no longer had to bear hunger," Bill Yee said. Shelley Fisher Fishkin is helping to direct the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University. She said, "Many of the Chinese workers who came to work on the transcontinental and other railroads returned to China after their work was done and created families there. Some of them settled in America and created new families, but they had families who they left when they came here and they may have descendants in China." There is a need to create a record of the object and spoken history from the families of the railroad workers. "The US could not have become the modern industrial nation without the railroads. And the railroads would not have come together without the work of these Chinese workers," said Shelley Fisher Fishkin. According to Bill Yee, many Chinese went to America in the 1860's mainly  _  .
to run their own businesses to find their ancestors to make a living to dig gold