In March 1939 Edwin Low Yow started the process of obtaining a Citizen’s Return Certificate at Immigration and Naturalization Service in Seattle. He testified that his full name was Edwin Low Yow and the American version was Edwin Low. He was twenty-three years old, a cab driver, and was born on 25 September 1915 at Killisnoo, Alaska. He presented a certified copy of this birth certificate to the Immigration Inspector. His father, Low Yow, was born in China, and his mother, Martha James, was an Alaska (full blood) Eskimo native. Low Yow was a cannery contractor in Alaska and spent most of the summer months there for several years.
Edwin’s mother, Martha James, died about 1916 when Edwin was about one-year old and his sister, Amy Low Yow, was about two years old. Their father, Low Yow, lived in Seattle when he was not working in Alaska. He also had a second wife, Chin Suie Heung (American name Helen), in Seattle.
Helen did not know that her husband had another wife in Alaska until after Martha James (his other wife) died. Low Yow brought the children to his home in Seattle when they were small and asked his second wife to take care of them. He did not admit that he was the children’s father until he was on his death bed. He died at age sixty-three at Seattle in March 1927.
Low Yow and Helen had four children; two died in infancy. Their surviving daughters were Daisy and Rose. Daisy married G. D. Graves and they lived in Seattle. Rose married Harley Tong. She spent five years in China with Harley then returned to Seattle and he remained there.
[Notice the inconsistent spelling of Low and Law throughout the document.]
Edwin’s sister, Amy Low Yow, was a witness for her brother. She was married to Willard Jew and they lived in Seattle. Edwin planned to leave for China through San Francisco so he applied for a Return Certificate through the office there and his paperwork was transfer to a San Francisco file. Immigration requested his parents’ death certificates. Amy obtained a certified copy of her father’s Seattle, King County, Washington, death certificate. She did not have enough information to get a copy of the certificate for her mother who died in Alaska.
Edwin and Amy’s stepmother, Helen, testified that she was born in San Francisco about 1881 and her childhood name Chin Suie Heung before she married and became Mrs. Law Yow. [She doesn’t mention that Helen was part of her name.] Her testimony about her daughters Daisy and Rose agreed with Edwin and Amy’s.
Edwin presented a copy of his birth certificate as proof of his citizenship. His application was approved.
The Reference Sheet in Edwin’s file contains the file numbers for his stepsister, Rose, and her husband, Harley.
[Low Yow Edwin was the father of CEA volunteer, Rhonda Farrar. Read about how Rhonda found her father’s file when she was indexing the Chinese Exclusion Act files.
