Roots of Village DB is an online database where one can search, by family names, for his or her home village. According to Dominic Yu, hoster of the database, the DB comes from the Index of Clan Names By Villages first published by the American Consulate General in Hong Kong in the 1970s. Originally used to investigate immigration fraud, this data is now available for genealogy research.

The search feature is easy to use.  On my trial run, I scrolled down the bilingual dropdown menu of the search box until I found my last name and clicked on it.  A list of villages  came up and  my home village was on the list. There are differences between the current administrative structure and the one provided by the DB, but village names are mostly the same.

I then copied the village name to Google Map. Google Map displays place names in Simplified Characters while the DB uses Traditional Characters. However, Google Map accepts Traditional Characters on the search input box, so I pasted the village name as is in Chinese, typed in  Taishan, Guangdong, China, et voila, here comes the Google earth view of my home village:

I had to move around the map a little bit as Google centered the map to the middle of a farming field. That is not a surprise since a village geographically includes farmlands owned by the villagers. Obviously, Google's AI machine has yet to figured out how to locate the exact location of a village even though it's AlphaGo has defeated the European Go Champion.

By the way, if you are interested in genealogy, Christine DeVillier has prepared a Chinese American Genealogy Toolkit presentation. You can download the slide set from her Hoisan Roots 台山根 site.