Ancestry tourists are skipping well-beaten paths, traditional destinations, and iconic landmarks. Instead, they’re focused on finding their personal landmarks and the supporting branches of their family trees.
If you’re considering an adventure like this, whether to find your immigrant ancestors in North America or uncover deep roots on another continent, good for you! Combining family detective work with the sights, sounds, and tastes of your ancestral homeland opens a whole new dimension of travel.
Still, it’s important to realize that planning and pulling off this kind of “trip of a lifetime” isn’t easy. A professional genealogical tour guide can make your heritage trip both productive and stress-free.
Getting expert help through The Writers for Hire’s Ancestry Tours can be the difference between a “wild goose chase” and an unforgettable, life-changing adventure.
How Does a Genealogical Tour Guide Help?
A genealogical tour guide helps you discover ties to family members separated by time and distance. This begins with handling all the complexities of trip planning, since these experts know the “ins and outs” of international travel.
Your tour guide travels with you to the places important to your family history and leads your onsite research. They’ve learned how to leap the hurdles to make archival research possible, and to find and access materials that reveal who your ancestors were, when and where they were born, and where they lived and died. Occupations, memberships, customs, and some personal details are often revealed, too.
Living relatives may even be located, and it’s possible your guide may be able to arrange a family get-together while you’re visiting. You never know what surprises are around the next corner on an ancestry tour!
Our genealogist at The Writers For Hire is certified in international tour management and has traveled extensively.
She is skilled at working in places where the information you want resides—from Ellis Island to archives of all types around the world. She is comfortable speaking several languages and can find and work with translators to help with communication and understanding documents.
Our team has visited a variety of places on domestic and international research trips and is eager to introduce you to them as well:
- City/county archives
- Courthouses
- State archives
- National archives
- Churches/parish archives
- Museums
- Historical societies
- Family history centers
- Local libraries
- Cultural centers
During our travels, conversations with local experts can provide valuable information about families, including unrecorded, handed-town tales (oral histories). That’s why our research often includes talking to:
- Genealogists
- Historians
- Authors
- Family history society members
- Museum curators
- Clergy
- Archivists
Your genealogist can photograph each stage of your trip, too, capturing your moments with significant people and documents (with permission, of course). These pictures will become treasures long after you are wheels-down back home.
Our resident genealogist describes her trip to Germany with a client:
I booked our flights and hotels and arranged all transportation.
While there, we met with a local expert who helped us with reading the Old German language in the archives. We found and visited the parish that our client’s ancestors belonged to and were able to arrange a tour of the church where many of his ancestors were baptized and married. I also arranged tours of nearby places of interest.
He was so excited. He was like a kid in a candy shop. It was really special to be able to show him these awesome places — making his very first trip to Europe a truly special moment in his life.
What Kinds of Options Will You Have on the Trip?
As the client, you are the “captain” at the helm of your trip. You decide how much you want to be involved in the research process, the kinds of things you want to see, and how long you want to travel.
Your trip will cater to your interests. Are you a World War II buff? We’ll include educational information on how the war affected the area and tour places of historical significance. Are you a foodie? We’ll focus on cuisine unique to the area, and how the history of the area influenced what people eat.
Some Things to Consider Up Front
For this journey into the past, you’ll want a qualified genealogical researcher/tour guide. Consider training and certifications, breadth of travel and tour experience, plus language capabilities. The Writers For Hire gets high marks in all these categories.
Besides booking your trip, your ancestry tour guide will be able to help you with destination-specific issues, including safety and accepted local customs and dress. We’ll even teach you some key phrases to help you communicate along the way.
Consider what you want your “take-aways” from this trip to be. Connections with distant family members, cultural knowledge, amazing photos, a complete family tree, a family history book? We’ll work with you to make these dreams reality, taking your budget into account.
You can help to ensure your expert’s pre-trip research is thorough — by giving them any information you have on your family members and ancestors. Dates of births, deaths, and marriages, emigration and citizenship are helpful. Photos can be, too, especially those with dates and locations included.
Why Book an Ancestry Tour with The Writers For Hire?
Our qualifications and expertise can help in ways you may have never considered.
Sometimes, the documents that will acquaint you with your ancestors are housed in archives that operate by strict rules, including requirements for handling documents or making appointments in advance.
Your genealogical tour guide from The Writers For Hire will be responsible for finding where your documents are located and the languages they’re written in, for making any necessary appointments, and for ensuring compliance.
The Takeaway
To document your trip and preserve it for you and your loved ones, The Writers For Hire will create the post-travel “takeaway” of your choice.
We can produce a beautiful, detailed family tree, a family history book, a coffee table-style photo/memory book — in short, any of our family history products. Your discoveries and memories can be shared and enjoyed in the present — and passed on to future generations.
