In practice, most people would define their ancestral homes as the birthplace of their patriline ancestors from the early 20th century, around the time when government authorities began to collect such information from individuals.
Moreover, a person's ancestral home can be defined in any level of locality, from province and county down to town and village, depending on how much an individual knows about their ancestry.
[citation needed] Forms that required listing of "ancestral home" (籍貫) included school handbooks to be signed by the parents of schoolchildren.
[1][better source needed] National ID cards issued in Taiwan by the Republic of China government formerly carried an entry for "home citizenship" (本籍).
Birth Certificates of Singapore issued by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority carried the entries for "dialect group" (labeled as 籍贯 in Chinese) for newborn's parents.