Linking to the Past

A family walks into a village on the banks of a European river, absorbing the knowledge that their ancestors once lived their lives in this same place for generations and imagining what it must have felt like to leave the village and travel across the Atlantic. Tomorrow, they may see the popular sights of the country, but they will see them differently, with a sense of ownership, because of their heritage. 

More than 100 million Americans can trace their lineage through the arrivals at Ellis Island. // © 2010 Elena Korenbaum

Tied as it is to the trends for family and multigenerational travel, the potential for genealogy-based travel is staggering. The search for a family’s history and roots unites family members and gives them a valid reason — which is vital in this marketplace — to take a European vacation. So far, the agency community has barely scratched the surface of this market, which includes more than 100 million Americans (a third of the U.S. population) who can trace their lineage through the arrivals at Ellis Island alone.

Jerry Rabas, owner of Weber Travel Agency in Willowbrook, Ill., said most agents offering heritage travel have been “ethnic” agents.

“Most of [the agents] have been around a long time and focus just on a particular community. They often aren’t technologically oriented and may not even have a presence online,” he said.

Yet, the Internet is central to the surge of interest in genealogy; a Google search brings up more than 97 million occurrences of the word. Even in 1999, Time magazine named genealogy as one of the four most popular topics on the Internet, and interest has snowballed since then.

Television has not been slow to capitalize on the genealogy fever, launching new programs such as “Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” which debuted on PBS in February, and “Who Do You Think You Are?” which began in March on NBC.

Once a family’s history is established, successful agents and tour operators agree that the mission is to fulfill the connection with previous generations as completely as possible while also providing a wonderful vacation experience for the family.

Weber Travel has been following this pattern in its organized tours and independent travel to the Czech and Slovak republics over the past 40 years, incorporating visits to ancestral homes into escorted tours.

“We leave at least one day free in Prague, for instance, for a day trip, and we may organize five to 10 drivers to take clients to their various villages. We have connections in Poland and Southern Germany and in Italy as well as the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” Rabas said. “I wouldn’t take a client where I didn’t have proven connections in the area.”

The key issue of having someone on site who intimately knows the region was also stressed by Neil Weidberg, director of operations for Heritage Tours Private Travel of New York City, which specializes in Jewish heritage travel in Spain, Morocco and Turkey.

“You need someone who knows the territory,” Weidberg said. “There may be one person who has the key to the synagogue a family is interested in. We have a great connection with the Jewish communities throughout Spain and Morocco, and we can organize a Passover seder or Shabbat dinner for a family where their ancestors lived.”

Even the trip across the Atlantic can form a base for a heritage vacation experience. Cunard Line’s sailings from 1839 include waves of Europeans who came to America, as does the history of Holland America Line, founded in 1873, which has scheduled two nine-day historical trans-Atlantic crossings onboard the Rotterdam in July to commemorate the journey that brought so many people to the U.S.

Although these new Americans came from all over Europe, some countries are particularly connected to U.S. immigration. According to Emma Thomas, media relations manager for Visit England in North America, the 2000 U.S. Census showed that more than 75 percent of the top 100 U.S. surnames can claim British origins. Thomas suggests that initial research can be done online at Ancestry.com and, for those tracing English ancestors, FreeBMD.org.uk provides an index of all births, marriages and deaths after 1837.

Information from the famed Domesday Book is now available online and is a huge resource for those wanting to find the actual houses where their relatives might have lived. The book itself, dating from 1086, contains records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties of the time and is housed in a specially made chest at the National Archives in London (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk).

General Tours can help customers of Northern European descent trace their roots with a four-day Emigrating-to-America Hamburg package, combining sightseeing with a trip to the BallinStadt Emigration Museum. Hamburg, Germany, was the most important emigration port in Germany from 1850 to 1934, not only for the emigrating Germans, who were mostly farmers, but for people from Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Poland and Russia. A mirror of Ellis Island, Hamburg had an immigration city for those waiting to leave. There was even a synagogue for Jewish immigrants fleeing the Russian pogroms. To find out whether Hamburg was the departure point for a given individual or family, there is Link to Your Roots online (www.linktoyourroots.com), with passenger lists and detailed information.

For those with more time to explore German heritage, the interactive Bremerhaven Emigration Center is designed for families tracing roots of the more than 7 million people who emigrated from Bremerhaven between 1830 and 1974. (www.niedersachsentourism.de/en/kids-familie/erlebniswelten/german-emigration-center/index.php)

Tourism Ireland (www.tourismireland.com) provides links to helpful sites and offers a brochure called “Tracing Your Ancestors in Ireland.” There is also a very useful site at IrishGenealogy.ie.

Americans of Scottish extraction will find excellent resources at AncestralScotland.com. The main resource center for genealogical research in Edinburgh is at General Register House, where a record of all birth, marriage and death records are held; visitors can not only go to the center to do their research, but they can arrange time with a genealogist to help. See ScotlandsPeopleHub.gov.uk for more info.

Selling Heritage Travel
A great deal of heritage travel is easily targeted through organizations; for instance, every state has at least two Scottish organizations and many have annual Scottish Games where genealogical travel can be promoted. Last names are certainly a cue; agents can go through their databases and address all families with surnames typical of a given country to form a group or promote via the Internet to people with similar surnames.

From another angle, nearly all people of European lineage have a connection to a castle becsause of the nature of the feudal system, and many of these castles are now open for touring or even for accommodations. Savvy agents can check castles operating as hotels, B and Bs or sightseeing destinations, look up the dominant names of the people who lived in the area and even trace groups that came to the New World to contact potential clients.

But whether it is responding to the needs of a single family seeking its roots or putting together a group with a genealogist pied piper, heritage travel is hot in North America, and the segment is ripe for skilled agents who can deliver a satisfying experience to their clients.