Sometimes visiting your ancestors’ hometowns isn’t enough to satisfy your curiosity. If you’re looking for more information than what you’ve uncovered on your own, consider taking an organized ancestry tour.
What are these? Let’s explore ancestry tours and some of the options available to you.
What is an Ancestry Tour?
An ancestry tour is any type of guided (and sometimes self-guided or audio-guided) tour that can teach you about your family’s history or the history of a population that may have included your direct family.
The key is that they’re not just a visit, but rather they offer an educational experience.
These tours can be highly-specific, related to only your family. Or they can offer more general information about historical residents of a particular place at a particular time.
Types of Ancestry Tours You Can Take
An ancestry tour can range from a quick genealogy day trip to a longer-term more distant vacation. Let’s look at some examples.
Day Trip Family History Tours
If you only have a short amount of time to devote to an ancestry tour, consider these options:
- Tour a particular building your ancestors lived in, worked in, or did something important in (such as where they arrived in your current country or even town).
- Take a historic walking tour in a town where your relatives lived.
- Visit a restored, or replica, ship like one your ancestors would have traveled on during their immigration.
- Tour a battlefield where your ancestors fought in a historical war.
- Tour a specialized museum related to your heritage or culture.
Genealogy Tours as Vacations
Day trips aren’t your only option.
You can do any of these things on a much larger scale, such as taking a vacation to the country of your family’s origin and taking some of these types of day trip ancestry tours while you’re there.
We’ll look more at heritage vacations in a future post, but know you aren’t limited to family history tour vacations you plan yourself either.
There are companies that will take your genetic genealogy data and hand-pick hotels and other destinations based on where your ancestors are from or what their migration might have looked like.
If you have a rough idea of where your family is from, or what they lived through, taking a guided tour can help you learn more and appreciate your family’s journey more deeply.
