Travel by ancestry adds a new dimension to planning a vacation.  With a search for ancestry as a primary focus, a vacation can span days, weeks, even centuries!

(The following article has been reprinted with the permission of McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (Mctdirect.com)):


Travel by Ancestry: A vacation takes on a new dimension when you add a search for family history to your travel plans.

July 9, 2012
by MARIE RUNDQUIST, McClatchy-Tribune
 
By following the paths of ancestors, your family vacation this summer can become a journey of exploration and a fun way to connect to the past.
 
Many communities have annual festivals, "Old Town Days," where families and friends gather to celebrate a town's history and the foods, traditions, music, language, dancing and ethnic heritage of its people. By attending a community festival in a town where your family's ancestors once lived, you can connect, in real-time, with the past and develop new relationships that last long after a vacation is over.
 
A detailed road map, coupled with a genealogy, helps your family retrace the paths ancestors followed as they moved from place to place. In a sense, your family can "live" the histories of the people who settled an area by traveling their routes; experiencing the same changes in scenery, climate and culture as they did during their journeys. Stop at a local library, museum or cultural center to uncover more clues about family history and the events surrounding an ancestor's arrival or departure from an area. The discovery of a journal entry, a photo of an old home site or a collection of traditional recipes adds value to the travel experience, as the present is informed by the past.
 
An ancestor's name, found on an immigration record or a ship's passenger list, inspires travel to an ancient homeland, where a search for familiar surnames - on street signs, in phone books, in the records, on graveyard markers and on the sides of buildings - keeps everyone involved in the hunt. Census records offer new clues to ancestry; an unexpected birthplace reported for an ancestor may prompt a trip halfway across the country - or around the world - to learn more about a family's past.
 
Travel by ancestry may find its beginnings in a hand-written letter, from one ancestor to another, describing a new land, inviting all to come for a visit. Accept the offer - and let a search for family history guide you to your next travel destination.
 
Marie Rundquist is a DNA project manager, collaborative research community moderator, president of an information systems consulting firm and author of Revisiting Anne Marie: How an Amerindian Woman of Seventeenth-Century Nova Scotia and a DNA Match Redefine "American" Heritage and Cajun by Any Other Name Recovering the Lost History of a Family and a People.

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Travel by ancestry adds a new dimension to planning a vacation.  With a search for ancestry as a primary focus, a vacation can span days, weeks, even centuries!

(The following article was reprinted with the permission of Brentwood News, "Westside Today," Los Angeles, California:)

This Summer, Improve Your Knowledge of Family, Ancestry
by Marie Rundquist | Brentwood News July 2012  |  July 20, 2012

Summer allows a much-needed break from hectic school schedules, parents take time for fitness, working-out, and getting back into shape. Along with water-bottles and sunscreen, books about how to feel good, lose weight, and look great clutter family beach bags.

During long summer nights, conversations among families often drift to old times, and family stories are shared. Without an understanding of family history, it’s easy for a parent to feel at a loss for words when a child asks questions about great grandparents, or wants to know where ancestors may have lived in early days.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Toss a couple of test kits into your beach bag when you pack for your family’s summer vacation, and improve what really counts -- family knowledge!

Interested in improving your knowledge of family and ancestry? The following types of test kits are available from different companies:

Y chromosome DNA test kit: Males in the family may connect with others who share the same, test results, identify most recent, common, paternal-line ancestors, verify genetic connections to common male ancestors through genealogy, and learn about deep ancestral origins. Prices for Y DNA test kits start at approximately ninety-nine dollars.

Mitochondrial (mtDNA) test kit: Males and females in the family can learn about earliest ethnic and geographic origins, and verify maternal-line connections to common, female ancestors through genealogy. Prices for mtDNA test kits start at approximately ninety-nine dollars.

Autosomal DNA test kit: Males and females in the family can learn about the shared genetic contributions of all ancestors, within the past four-to-five generations of a family tree, identify close matches among others who take the test, and by comparing genealogies, discover long-lost cousins. Autosomal DNA test kits vary in price; most are available for less than three hundred dollars.

Note: Before you purchase any test kit, read all company literature to learn about the types of results you’ll receive as well as customer reviews. Find out if there are ways for you to share information with others who test, and if memberships or additional subscription fees are necessary.

Marie Rundquist is a DNA project manager, collaborative research community moderator, president of an information systems consulting firm and author of Revisiting Anne Marie: How an Amerindian Woman of Seventeenth-Century Nova Scotia and a DNA Match Redefine “American” Heritage and Cajun by Any Other Name Recovering the Lost History of a Family and a People.

Click here for more information.

Travel by ancestry adds a new dimension to planning a vacation.  With a search for ancestry as a primary focus, a vacation can span days, weeks, even centuries!

A visitor to the Grand Pré National Historic Site of Canada may encounter Evangeline, the fictional heroine of a poem written in the nineteenth century by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and her lover Gabriel, portrayed as a blacksmith's son, on the eve of their expulsion from Acadia. 

A visit to Grand Pré, Nova Scotia in the fall of 1755 finds a very real blacksmith's son, his young Acadian wife, and their children, awaiting the same fate as their fictional counterparts, their story no less wrenching; their experience no less dramatic.  Drive a short distance to an isolated beach in present-day Hortonville, and live the experience of this same blacksmith's son, his family, and others, as they board the ships that would forever separate them from their homeland, their footprints on the shore still fresh.

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Travel by ancestry adds a new dimension to planning a vacation.  With a search for ancestry as a primary focus, a vacation can span days, weeks, even centuries!

In Maine, a hike along a trail to the Damariscotta River ends with a view of an immense shell midden.  The presence of the Native American community that lived in the area for thousands of years is still felt here, on a river where salt water mixes with fresh as easily as the present with the past.

Nearby, the layers of a smaller, remnant shell midden are still apparent, each telling its own story of a time, a culture, and a people.

Travel by ancestry adds a new dimension to planning a vacation.  With a search for ancestry as a primary focus, a vacation can span days, weeks, even centuries!  A trip to Maryland's Eastern Shore, can include a stop in the 18th century, with a visit to the White Marsh Episcopal Church (circa 1690).  You'll find the ruins of the old church just outside of the historic port town of Oxford, Maryland, on Route 50. 

Take a short walk from your car to the 14th of December, 1755, when port master Henry Callister and his friend, The Reverend Thomas Bacon, took up a special collection and pleaded with Oxford's plantation families to help the 263 starving and destitute Acadian exiles just recently arrived on Oxford's docks, from Nova Scotia, Canada.

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Travel by ancestry adds a new dimension to planning a vacation.  With a search for ancestry as a primary focus, a vacation can span days, weeks, even centuries! At Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folklife Park in Lafayette, Louisiana, find out how Acadian culture (and two story homes) survive centuries of living; connect with early Acadian heritage, history (and music!) of eighteenth-century Louisiana.  

In a garden at Vermilionville, a chameleon who makes his home in a branch of a tree, changes his color from the bright green of an adjoining leaf to the dark brown of his perch in a matter of seconds -- much like how Acadian ancestors, on arrival in Louisiana in the late 1760s, quickly adapted to suit their surroundings. 

At Vermilionville, an ensemble of musicians plays traditional Cajun music.  Strong on strings, fiddlers take the lead, there's an accordion section, and a galvanized steel bucket, carries a significant part of the melody. 

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