ICWales.co.uk, the national website for Wales, has an interesting article, “Ancestry site set to trigger visitor boom”, that speaks of the hottest fad in travel: genealogy. The hobby and passion of researching family history is growing around the world, including in your community, as more and more people take advantage of online databases and computer technology to explore their family roots. Genealogy Tourism may be coming to a town near or far from you.
A website helping Americans find their roots is tipped to create a boom in Welsh visitor numbers as they trace their family trees back here.
Wales is expected to enjoy major benefits thanks to strong mining and steel working links with the USA over the decades.
It is thought many more Americans have Welsh roots than is realised, and famous faces such as Tom Cruise have already been tracked by the site, Ancestry.com.
The combination of celebrity allure and other tourists tracing their own family trees could prove highly lucrative, it was predicted last night.
Genealogy tourism has become a growing market in recent years, thanks to the internet which has enabled people to research their family tree online.
The article continues with advisories to the tourist and related industries to prepare for the tourist invasion as more and more Americans cross the technical and physical divide overseas to find their family roots.
With the price of gas and travel rising, not all Americans are not looking overseas for their ancestors. Communities throughout the United States and Canada are beginning to explore the tourist market appealing to genealogists and family history researchers and fans. For some families, just exploring their family within the past 100 years gives them plenty of vacation opportunities as they explore the path their ancestors took across the country after immigration.
If you are exploring your family’s history, why not narrow it to a specific place and see what historical events, museums, recreations, and recreational opportunities are available there and plan a trip with your family?
My mother and I recently flew back to Wisconsin, a major location on her family’s history. We didn’t need much to stimulate our imagination as we stood in the Northern wild and woolly woods in Marinette County and realized that we were seeing not so much an area that has reverted almost completely back to nature after intensive logging, but a real glimpse at what this area may have looked like when our family arrived. They brought with them axes, shovels, and their strong will and backs, clearing land, digging gardens, building homes, cutting a survival out of the wild land.
Listening to the birds chirp, the bees buzz, the mosquitoes humming, along with ping-ponging frog sounds from the nearby swamps, we could close our eyes and recall the family stories and for a moment, feel and hear what it was like to live there almost 80 years ago.
Part of the adventure of a family history trip is not knowing what you will find when you get there, and if it looks like what it did when your ancestors lived there. You might find surprises, you might find a WalMart. Either way, it will be an adventure, in the United States or overseas. Go for it.
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