Martinus (Marty) Wolf is originally from Hillsboro, Oregon and currently lives in Sacramento, California. He obtained M.S. and B.S. degrees in Civil Engineering and a B.A. degree in Japanese from Stanford University in 1994. He currently works as a consulting environmental engineer specializing in air quality. Although he is half-Dutch (his father was born in Amsterdam in June 1940 during the early weeks of the Nazi Occupation of The Netherlands), he has been primarily focused on Japanese genealogy and family history.

This interest was sparked about 10 years ago while he and his wife were visiting his mother-in-law in Kyoto, Japan. She requested help in requesting her ancestors’ koseki (family registers) from municipal offices in neighboring Shiga prefecture. Ultimately, he successfully obtained koseki documents from six different municipal offices. After sharing this experience with a Japanese American friend, this friend suggested teaching a “how to” class about requesting koseki documents.

Since that time, Mr. Wolf has taught in-person introductory koseki classes at a number of local Buddhist and Christian churches that were established by Japanese immigrants over a century ago. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns, Mr. Wolf moved to a monthly on-line Zoom class format – which continues to the present time. With the Zoom format, he has reached a total of nearly 4,000 people of Japanese heritage in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Great Britain, Spain, France, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. In addition, since 2021, he has prepared 16 different on-demand class sessions for the RootsTech family history conference covering varied topics such as Japanese land records, Buddhist death registers, and Japanese calendars.

Mr. Wolf also founded the Japanese Family History Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/japanese.family.history) with over 2,500 members in June 2021.

In order to assist people requesting Japanese koseki documents, Mr. Wolf has been developing a number of English-language tools. First of all, he developed a generic universal koseki request form that can be used instead of the unique Japanese- language request form required by each of the 1,900+ current municipal offices – this form has been successfully used to request koseki documents from nearly 250 different municipalities. He has also developed a first-of-its-kind English-language crosswalk database that links the 15,000+ village names from the time that modern geopolitical administrative divisions were established in Japan (1889) to the present-day municipalities. He has added another 30,000+ village names dating back to the Meiji Restoration (1868) for prefectures with significant amounts of emigration (e.g., Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto). He is currently working to identify additional Japanese-language records held by academic institutions for potential digitization and indexing.

Courses

  • 2025 – Course Six – Japanese Genealogy: From Japan to the Americas