ancestry tourism

The Macquarie Dictionary has quite a collection of different kinds of tourism: dental care tourism, destination tourism, event tourism, fertility tourism, film tourism, grief tourism, health tourism, orphanage tourism, space tourism, suicide tourism, war tourism and wellness tourism.

 This one, ancestry tourism, goes by other names. It is sometimes genealogy tourism or roots tourism. Whatever it is called it involves travelling to the land of your ancestors and  seeing what you can find out to add to information for your family history.  Some of the local history societies are seeing an opportunity for their services in this. Provided with a brief they can dig up what they have in their resources and become an integral part of the journey that the ancestry tourist undertakes.

 Ancestry tourism can be regarded as one form of emotional tourism because it springs from a desire to connect more deeply to a place and to the people, your people, in that place. Emotional tourism is the answer to the feeling that people have now that their tourism is so packaged and filtered that they never actually engage with anyone in the places they visit. The tourist boat pulls up at the quay, the tourists are loaded into a bus with a guide, they return to the ship and they leave without even spending a dollar in the town let alone meeting the locals. So emotional tourism is all about making those connections. It can be holiday exchanges where the people swapping houses get to know each other. It can be couch surfing where the surfer establishes a good relationship with the host. It is tourism which leaves you with a deeper understanding of people in other places.