The weather has been pretty grim recently. Cold, damp and dark and at times like this our thoughts can turn to booking a holiday to escape the chill or to have a trip to look forward to in the warmer months.  The question is, can holidays and genealogy be combined? Can you sneak in a relevant record office as part of your holiday, maybe visit the land of your forefathers or even take a fully organised genealogy trip?   There are several options.

From the UK the most popular trips are to the battlefields of the First World War.  Visiting the grave or monument connected to a relative is a poignant moment as is seeing the vast swathes of gravestones across the countryside. The area is easy to reach from the UK by plane, train or automobile.

 There are numerous tourist trips around the battlefields but this is nothing new.  From 1919 tours from the UK to the battlefields became popular, and lots of options were available. People wanted to visit the last resting place of a relative or the walk on the ground where they fought and fell.  It was a very different experience then as the fields were still churned and  muddy, not cleared fully of munitions or even body parts. Barbed wire, clothing and shells still littered the landscape and burned out or destroyed towns and villages lay all around.  Tours were advertised in local and National newspapers such as this example from the Daily Express 28^th July 1920:

Or an earlier tour advertised in The Leeds Mercury in July 1919:

Today there is a much more sanitised choice of trips to the area of the Great War and the beautifully cared for CWGC cemeteries.   A visit to the Menin Gate, where the bugle sounds the last post every night, is an integral part of a trip to the charming town of Ypres or you could enjoy a wander through the streets and baroque style squares of Arras on the Somme.

Also today there are other options for combining a passion for genealogy with a holiday.  How about a genealogy cruise? In conjunction with AncestryPro , for example, there are opportunities to join a river cruise where, after a pre-tour consultation with an experienced genealogist, you join your tour during which they will help you ‘understand  your personal links to the beautiful regions as you travel’. AncestryPro offer other ‘Ancestral Home Visits’ on dry land too promising to show you the exact plot of land where your family once lived, visits to churches or schools they attended and their graves or burial places.  There are many companies offering this type of tailor made holiday to Europe.  Some specialise in an particular area of a country and although most appear to be aimed at the American market that is not solely the case.

Maybe not the most cheery option for a summer holiday but there are also  escorted ‘Holocaust Tours’ mainly run from the UK.  A visit to a death camp is definitely an emotional and sobering experience, even more so if there is a connection with a family member, a victim or a survivor. The 8 day ‘Holocaust and Nazi Death Camps’  tour of Poland  offered by one company reminds me of the film ‘A bit of a Pain’ which I saw last month at the cinema.  It’s about two Jewish cousins from the US who join just such a trip and also visit where their late grandmother and holocaust survivor once lived.  It has already won several awards including two Baftas yesterday and is worth a watch.  Other tour companies throw in a bit of Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler on a longer tour.

For those of us who prefer to do our own research it’s fun to arrange our own visit to an area of family history interest.  Mr GinandGenealogy still likes to tell anyone who will listen how he was forced to spend the first few days of his holiday to Canada in the archives, at cemeteries and visiting family homes long since deserted as detailed in a previous blog ‘”A Bragg Creek Fireplace “(https://ginandgenealogy.co.uk/2017/06/03/a-bragg-creek-fireplace/).  If a visit to the archives is on the cards it is best, obviously, to know something of the record office and their holdings before your trip and whether the records are available to order.  Many archives, all over the world, have an online catalogue you can consult and in general archivists are a helpful bunch who will reply to an email asking about a specific holding and there is always Google Translate if you get stuck.  

Family holidays and family history can easily be combined, although it does depend on your travelling companions.  My advice is to break them in gently; a meal at the pub where Great- Great Grandmother Blanche served up a selection of ales or a boat trip around the coast that was  familiar to a fisherman ancestor.  You can hit them with the holocaust tour the following year.