Chinese-Indonesian here. My grandparents all came from China during early 1900s.
My grandparents have all died before I was born (except a grandmother who spoke minimum Indonesian and just basic Chinese; she spoke Hakka instead, and died when I was 16) so I have difficulty tracing even for grand-aunts or grand-uncles.
For more information, my surname is Xiao (written 萧) and my grandfather from my father came from Meixian. His name is Xiao Mugui (written 萧木贵) and he was once a soldier under Mao Zedong who also joined the Long March.
My uncle told me he ran away from the Long March, hid somewhere around his hometown, and then the Japanese came and did massacres here and there. He fled to Indonesia to avoid being killed, but no idea on the exact year or date.
Hi, this isn't really a history question. While it's possible that someone here can help you, it would be worth x-posting to /r/genealogy, or a regional sub
http://siyigenealogy.proboards.com/ , a good place to start. Go check his tomb, might write where he from.
This is a /r/genealogy answer, not a /r/askhistorians answer. Once again, I beg mod forgiveness.
I'm going to assume you are in Indonesia. I'd suggest reaching out to Indonesian genealogy groups to see what sort of records they are searching.
There's several approaches to genealogy. A common approach is a simple collecting of names. This is what you want to avoid. These are the family trees where individuals have a birth date, a dash, then a death date. No other details.
You want to find people who have "filled in the dash" - given details about their family lives. More importantly, people who can share how they did this. You're looking for records that shed details on people - and if you don't know much, you need to look at communities in points of time. Look at all historical records that you can. Don't narrow your focus on your family - neighbors can frequently be helpful. Emigrants don't usually choose a random spot on a map to head to, instead there's a reason. That reason may be other relatives have already went to the same place, or other people in their village went to the same place. Even if they were the first, other family members may have gone later, based on their accounts.