One Wednesday night in December 1975, twenty-seven people gathered in the basement conference room of Cathay Bank in Los Angeles Chinatown to form a new historical society. Most of them were Chinese Americans in their forties and fifties. In their day jobs, they represented many different professions: city workers and housewives, secretaries and engineers; one was a pastor at a local church, and another was a graduate student at UCLA.

Most of them were born in California where they had attended high school and college. Despite being well-educated and middle-aged, almost none of them had ever been given an opportunity to study their own history. Their high school history textbooks ignored the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Their college history professors did, too. Indeed, nearly the entire profession of US historians in the 1970s believed that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders were not important to study.

Fifty-three-year-old Margie Lew was a city hall worker when she attended the first meeting. She recalled, “I looked up my old history book to see what it said about the Chinese in the US, and all it had was one line about the railroads. That’s all I knew. In school, they never taught anything about Chinese people in the United States.” Lew and the others were prepared to fill the gaps in their own education.

“They were talking about a historical society where we could learn about the history of the Chinese in the United States and what they were doing all those years from the gold rush days… So, I was really, really excited,” Lew said. That evening in 1975, this group of middle-aged women and men founded the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC). The society’s mission was to understand the significant historical role of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Southern California.

Do you know your own family history? Do you know the history of your neighborhood? When you look at a history textbook in school, do you see your own history reflected in that textbook? Or, like Margie Lew, do you feel overlooked?

Too often we think of history as something that happens outside of us, as a subject that we study in school. We think that history is something written by other people, about other people, and often for other people. Margie Lew didn’t think of history this way. She thought of history as something written by, about, and for her community.

Margie Lew and the members of the CHSSC are what we call “community historians.” The members of the CHSSC realized that no one else was going to write their history for them. If they wanted to see themselves represented in history, they needed to document that history themselves.

Only a few people grow up and get jobs at universities as historians, but every one of us has the potential to be a community historian. In order to become a community historian, all you need is a little training and the desire to document the history of our families, neighborhoods, and communities. It is almost certain that the various communities you are a part of have historical stories that need to be documented. With a few new skills, you can be the person who does that documentation.