Hola amigos: Today I bring you “Time Travel” where genealogy enthusiasts trace their roots to distant places, expanding their sense of family. It’s a new trend, a newly recognized genre of travel: genealogical tourism, genealogical travel; people traveling back in time -as a figure of thought – to the places where their ancestors lived and died a long time ago; traveling far away in search of their own roots, finding lost connections with tears and jubilation, knowing how history affects them in their lives today, getting a sense of belonging, finding a piece of them that’s suddenly real, recognizing how truly interconnected we all are … ES
Time Travel Image
By Leslie Forsberg
Alaska Airlines Magazine
http://hagersjourneys.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Hagers-Journeys-Genealogical-Adventures-Alska-Airlines-Magazine.pdf
In a high-rise O‘ahu condo overlooking
the quicksilver waves of the Pacific,
my cousin Kaethe clears away the
dinner dishes and then hauls out a
thick volume. “I’ve got a surprise for
you,” she says. Carefully lifting open the
faded, crumbling cover, I find myself staring
at a pencil sketch of massive sailing
vessels, sails billowing full, the words
“HMS Shah” scrawled above. On the
right-hand page, spidery inscriptions flow
breathlessly, “… with our hearts light and gay
having gotten everything on board we got up steam
weighed and bid farewell to Spithead having to call
in at Plymouth we steamed down Channel and hove
in sight of Plymouth in the night. …”
I can hear my heart pounding as I ask,
“What’s this?”
“This is my grandfather,and your great-grandfather,
Harry Coventon’s British sea journal, from
when he served in the British Royal Navy, around
1881,” Kaethe says, eyes sparkling. She tells me that
cousins in my hometown of Port Angeles, Washington,
who had told few about the document, gave her
the journal to digitize for family members. I’ve never
heard anyone in my family mention such a treasure.
My husband, Eric, and I
have traveled to O‘ahu to visit Kaethe, a cousin
I’d never really known but had been curious about
since finding a letter among my father’s things after
he passed away. It was a handwritten copy of a letter
from my grandmother to Kaethe, giving her the
names and address of our last-known English relatives,
a section of the family that had remained in
Europe as my paternal great-grandfather broke away
for a new life in a new land
When I booked my trip to O‘ahu, it hadn’t yet
dawned on me how little I knew about my family,
and that by traveling to spend time with relatives a
generation older than I was, I might discover nuggets
of family history that I’d never heard in the
stories told by my father. In fact, I discovered much
more detail and even other perspectives on what I
thought I knew about my family. I swiftly learned
that each branch of the family has its own stories,
and that taking the opportunity to meet with others
and share information creates a fuller and richer
view of family, past and present. Traveling to visit
family members—no matter how distantly related—
not only greatly expands my understanding of my
family history, but also offers insights about family
traits that continue from generation to generation.
When I launched my genealogical journey, I
didn’t know that I would be riding a wave of genealogical
interest along with millions of other Americans. And
I hadn’t known that my visits to Old
World and New World places would be part of a
newly recognized genre of travel: genealogical
travel.
Carla Santos, a widely recognized expert in
genealogical tourism and an associate professor in
the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism at
the University of Illinois, notes that genealogy is
among the most-practiced hobbies in the United
States. What many do with the information they
acquire about their ancestors is what interests Santos.
A relatively new trend is people traveling back
in time, so to speak, to the places where their ancestors lived.
“Genealogical tourism is one of the fastest-growing markets
in vacation travel,” says Santos, and it’s
a market that is appealing to all kinds of people.
“We all come from somewhere,” she says.
“It could be that one of my family members was
born in Philadelphia, so I’m going to go to Philadelphia.
Maybe I go to the cemetery and the
county courthouse, then I tour the town and get a
sense for what it’s like where they came from.”
This type of tourism represents a shift, Santos
says. “In the 1980s and ’90s we thought of tourism
as escaping or going somewhere exotic. Today, tourism is
often about personal enrichment and nostalgia.
It’s about having experiences that enrich our
personal lives.”
Marion Hager, owner of Scottsdale, Arizona–
based Hager’s Journeys, a small boutique travel
agency that specializes in heritage travel, agrees.
“More and more, we’re seeing that
baby boomers want enrichment,
experiences, nostalgia,” she says. “So
naturally it goes hand in hand that
they want to see the countries their
grandparents came from. This has
stimulated independent travel. Some
will still book a standard tour, but
genealogical travelers are more likely
to want to go to places where most
tour groups don’t go.”
Specialty tourism agencies such as
Hager’s Journeys have stepped in to fill the void,
taking people on tours with personalized agendas,
such as visiting the school their great-grandparents
went to or connecting with a relative they’ve never
met. Even hotels have stepped in to offer services to
travelers in search of ancestral families.
In Ireland, a country that sent millions to the
New World in the 19th century, The
Shelbourne Dublin caters to visitors
with Irish roots. The hotel’s Genealogy Butler
provides a personalized treasure map that includes a one
hour consultation (over tea, of course), a genealogical assessment,
a proposed research program, an overview of Irish sources and a map
to history repositories. The Scottish equivalent can be found
at Dalmunzie Castle, a luxury lodging that
describes itself as the fi rst genealogy hotel in the
United Kingdom.
Europe isn’t the only place seeing a surge in
genealogical travel. Throughout the United States,
travelers are seeking the towns and landscapes
where their ancestors once lived. Alice Fairhurst,
the president and a researcher at the Southern California
Genealogical Society, flew to Portland to joinher son and
grandkids on a memorable road trip to Eastern Oregon,
where her husband’s grandfather was once the mayor of the
town of Enterprise. “My husband’s mother, Oris, raced palomino
ponies and could ride with the best of them,”
Fairhurst says. “They often stayed in cottages at
Wallowa Lake. So of course we visited there, to see
the lake and the cottages. To see what it was like
where my son’s great-grandmother lived, to fi nd her
high school and then even to fi nd a picture of her in
a book in a local museum. … It had a huge impact
on all of us,” she says.
The Southern California Genealogical Jamboree,
the society’s annual convention, held in Burbank, is
one of the largest in the nation. “We usually have
1,700 or so people attending from across the U.S. and
other countries,” Fairhurst says. “People get to the
age of 40 or 50—though lots are interested in their
teens—and all of a sudden mortality comes knocking,
and people are interested in fi nding out about
their roots. And that’s when they come to places like
this, to learn how to do genealogical research.”
Genealogical conferences are held regularly
throughout the United States, offering an abundance
of information for those just starting the
search or for those who want to dig deeper than the
resources they’ve been able to find on the Internet.
One of the nation’s largest exhibitions is
held annually in Washington, D.C. The
National Archives’ annual Genealogy
Fair, held each April, has grown dramatically in
recent years, from 3,000 attendees in 2010 to
5,000 in 2011 to 5,400 this year.
“We’re the national center for federal
records, so we’ve always had a strong genealogy
program,” says Diane Dimkoff, director of the
National Archives’ Genealogy Fair. “We find that
there are always so many new people every year.
Haven’t we reached everybody yet?” she asks with a
laugh. “There can’t be any new people left, yet every
year there are hundreds or thousands more. We
outgrew the building, so we hold the fair outside in
tents on our plaza.”
The fair offers scores of speakers on topics ranging from
preserving family records to researching Civil War
pension files.“The records we have are those someone
would have if they interacted with the federal
government,” Dimkoff says. “If you were an
immigrant and you went through Ellis Island or
another port, we’d have information on that. If
someone was living in the country during one
of the census periods, that would show up. If they
acquired federal land or were in military service,
from the Civil War forward, we have information on that.”
A lot of the records are on microfilm and available in
regional archives, but the National Archives
is the one place where everything is available.
oots-related travel has become exceptionally
popular in the past few years, but what
prompted this surge of interest? For many
Americans, the notion of searching for one’s ancestral
family started with the TV show Who Do You
Think You Are?, an American adaptation of a British
documentary series, which had a two-year run in
the United States beginning in 2010. During each
episode, a celebrity—such as Gwyneth Paltrow or
Spike Lee—traveled to far-flung locales while tracing
their family trees, led by expert genealogists.
“I noticed that when Who Do You Think You Are?
started airing, we had a huge surge of interest in our
genealogical society,” says Lori East, library director
of the Tuolumne County Genealogical Society in
Sonora, California. “The show made it look easy to
do such research, as though you can just walk into
the National Archives and they’ll do it for you,” she
notes. “That doesn’t really happen. You have to do it
for yourself.”
After quizzing family elders for information,
most people start with the Internet. That’s how I got
my start, on the most popular site in the United
States, Canada and Australia: Ancestry.com has
2 million paid subscribers. (The company’s latest
foray into genealogy includes DNA testing.) Within
minutes of keying in my name, and my parents’ and
grandparents’ names, small quivering leaves
appeared beside names, suggesting “hints” that
might lead to scans of official records, such as birth,
marriage and death certifi cates, or suggestions of a
connection to someone else’s family tree that has an
individual of the same name and vital statistics.
In a few days of inputting information,
I’d grown my family tree signifi cantly and
discovered documents offering the names
of my great-grandmothers on my mother’s
side—women whose names my mother
didn’t even know. One passed away before
my mother was born, the other when my
mother was still a child. Hannah, from an
English family in Ontario, Canada, and
Sophia, from Hanover, Germany, suddenly
seemed real to me.
My Internet research fueled my imagination
and made me wonder what life was
like for these people. How much of who I
am comes from those who came before me?
“We all want to know where we came
from, what makes us who we are,” Dimkoff
notes. “People want to know how history
affects them in their lives today,” she adds.
“I hear people say, ‘That’s why I’m so stubborn. …
He never gave up.’ ”“Doing your family genealogy
offers asense of belonging and community,” says
Dimkoff. “It’s a deep passion, and fundamentally,
it’s emotional.”
Merrill White, a librarian at the
immense Family History Library in Salt
Lake City—a collection of more than 2.4
million rolls of microfi lmed genealogical
records from the United States, Canada, the
British Isles, Europe, Latin America, Asia
and Africa—says he sees tears and jubilation daily.
“People who come here find connections, often after
they’ve been looking for years. Whenever anybody
finds an ancestor in a record, the second they see them
on a piece of paper, there’s an instant feeling of
joy. ‘That’s him! That’s my family!’ is what
they all say. It’s an instant connection; it’s a
piece of them that’s suddenly real.”
The library and its mammoth collection
of genealogical data is owned and curated
by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. The Family History Library averages a
half-million visitors a year from around
the world. In summer, the library
averages 2,000 visitors a day.
egan Smolenyak, the author
of six books, including Hey,
America, Your Roots Are Showing
and Who Do You Think You Are?,
a companion to the TV series, was the person
who traced President Barack Obama’s roots
to Moneygall, in Ireland.
“The Internet and all of the records that
are available today are great,” she says, “but
if you want to know your ancestors as
living, breathing people, you have to go to
the places where they came from.”
Smolenyak’s roots are in a tiny village in
Slovakia. “When we visited relatives, we
increased the population by 10 percent,” she
says with a laugh. “When I go to Slovakia,
I’m treated like family … because I am. We
really do treat family a little differently.
Even if you’re fourth cousins, there’s an
extra ounce of consideration,” she says.
“Millions of people are doing that and
recognizing how truly interconnected we are.”
Jennifer Wilson of Des Moines, Iowa,
author of the 2011 book Running Away to
Home, began her search for connection in
2008 when the last of her immigrant relatives
passed away: Sister Mary Paula Radosevich,
her mother’s aunt, was almost 100 years old.
“The nuns gave me Sister Mary Paula’s
personal papers, and as a new parent I
became obsessed with this little village
that seemed suspended in amber since my
great-grandparents left it. My family had
no stories, no recipes, no language from
this place. At the time the economy was
crashing, and I thought, ‘There’s no better
time to return than the present.’ ”
Wilson and her husband packed up
their family, including 7-year-old Sam and
4-year-old Zabie, and they lived for 4 ∂
months in the ancient mountain village of
Mrkopalj, Croatia. “It was a reverse immigration,
back to the beginning of our American family,
as I knew it, and it was hugely intimidating for me
at first,” she reflects. Soon after they arrived,
Wilson’s husband was “ferried off to the local bar by
the guys in the village.” Wilson suddenly
felt very alone. Yet, once villagers learned
why the family was there—that they really
wanted to know what their ancestors experienced—
people came out of their houses
and welcomed the small family.
“The old women schooled me in what
life was like for my grandmother,” Wilson
says. “They taught me old recipes, how to
gather herbs and flowers for tea, how to
knit with five needles. … It was a beautiful
thing. “My kids fit right in,” she continues.
“They got to have the childhood experiences
that we and our parents had. They had freedom
in mountain meadows climbing trees and eating apples.”
“[The experience] really re-jiggered our
understanding of what family was,” Wilson
says. “We found that the connection
remains.
We can’t forget that as Americans
we’re from all over the world. They still
saw us as family, and were deeply moved
that we came home after 100 years.”
’ve had many of my own “coming
home” moments as I’ve traveled in
search of my own roots.
In a small town in British Columbia, I greeted a
cousin and his wife whom I met through
Ancestry.com, only to learn that they had
regularly traded Christmas cards with my
father, and had photographs of my beloved
Grandma Nessie to share. I was thrilled to
meet a Montana cousin who was once a
congressman who played a prominent role
in national environmental issues.
In Kid derminster, England, I visited distant
relatives of Grandma Nessie’s, a lovely
family related to me so far back in time
(dating to my fourth great-grand father,
born in 1788), that the connection has
expanded my definition of family.
Yet it was in Switzerland that I had my
ultimate genealogical travel experience: I’d
traveled with my husband and 18-year-old
daughter, Kirsten, to the historic resort of
Gyrenbad in the foothills of the Alps.
Through genealogical research, I’d learned
that the resort had belonged to my paternal
great-grandmother’s uncle, Heinrich Peters.
When Peters’ brother (my paternal greatgreat uncle)
emigrated to the United Statesin the late 19th century,
he bought farmland in Port Angeles that he named
Gyrenbad Ranch—which became part of the
family farm on which I grew up. My greatgrandmother,
Alwine, left Switzerland at age 18 to join her uncle
at Gyrenbad Ranch, where she raised three children, including
my grandfather, Clarence Forsberg.
I’d let the resort managers know I was
coming to visit Switzerland, and the elderly
proprietor, who spoke no English, met us in
the lobby. She excitedly gestured for us to
follow her onto the balcony, where I was
puzzled to see her pulling aside thick vines
from the railing. Suddenly the ethereal past
became very real as I glimpsed a message
from centuries earlier: the iron-scrollwork
initials H.P., for Heinrich Peters.
Moments later, Kirsten was settling into
her room where the sashes were thrown
wide toward Swiss cows grazing in a lush
pasture, the music of their bells drifting in
through the window. In the hallway outside her
room, my eye was caught by an
early-20th century photograph, and the
fine hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
In the picture, standing proudly in a lower
window of the hotel was Heinrich Peters.
My great-grandmother Alwine posed in
another window, and in another window
was the unmistakable visage of my
Grandpa Clarence as a young boy, next to
his brother and sister. “Hi Grandpa, I’m
here,” I said, softly.
Dennis Ford
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