DNA kits plus travel: exploring your ancestry

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Exciting and engaging the most seasoned of travellers can be near impossible, especially among those for whom money is no obstacle. With bespoke travel experiences to surprising locations, however, luxury travel companies are curating opportunities for even the most jaded adventurer, and immersive experiences appear to be the way of the future. In this series, Canadian Family Offices explores exclusive, uniquely crafted travel experiences.

Two trends can combine into one in this idea for a travel itinerary. People are increasingly turning to meaningful experiences, rather than simply seeing the sights, as part of their travel plans. There is also a growing interest in exploring our ancestry.

The idea: a personal trip around the world to trace your family’s ancestry.

Bespoke, luxury travel companies are allowing guests to plan exclusive, tailor-made holidays that work around tracing their roots, with personal genealogy specialists and archivists at your service and all the luxe accommodations and meals you could want along the way.

Black Tie Travel curates personalized heritage journeys in partnership with Ancestry

“People have access to information that is on-line or through DNA [kits], but this is just a list of dates, mainly births, deaths, marriages and censuses,” said Andrew Newman, founder and CEO of Toronto-based Black Tie Travel, a bespoke, luxury company that can curate a personalized heritage journey in partnership with Ancestry, an American genealogy company based in Utah.

“This provides no context, no ‘whys’ – we work with professional genealogists in every country, in every region, so we can gather off-line information from county records, parish records, talk with family members and search for company information and the stories that are not online. This adds far more colour and explains so much more [family history], economically, religiously, politically and with respect to diseases, wars and advances in technology and medicine.”

Newman says that as many people have been estranged from family and friends after extensive periods of lockdown and social distancing, interest in tracing personal history and connection to family roots has increased. People are seeking to find more about the old photographs and birth certificates they may have found during pandemic cleaning.

“Online information will provide you with the basic facts, the skeleton,” said Newman. “Offline will provide the body, the why, the story and the reasons behind actions that make us who we are today.”

To take the research further, Black Tie partners their clients with Ancestry, allowing full access to experts from the Association of Professional Genealogists and family historians based in Canada, the United States, Britain, Ireland, and beyond. Clients are given access through archivists to billions of documents around the world, and a personal researcher is assigned to guide them throughout each phase and destination of their journey.

To initiate the experience, Black Tie sends clients a Heritage Journeys gift box containing detailed information on the process, along with an Ancestry DNA kit and a one-year World Deluxe subscription to Ancestry. A client is then paired with their researcher to discuss the origins of their custom travel experience.

Once preliminary research on ancestors is underway, Black Tie curates clients’ travel to “walk in their footsteps”, allowing them to visit the most prominent locations from their findings, or those of most interest.

“The offline genealogy takes place, and we present a beautifully bound book of our findings,” said Newman. “It is from this point that we start planning the ‘walking in the steps of our ancestors’ trip.

“It matters not how much wealth one has; we all want to see where our relatives, lived, worked, played and died. It is always emotional, it is always revealing, and it is always worthwhile and frequently shocking. In effect, it is real, it is what it is, we cannot sanitize history, nor spin facts. The truth is the truth.”

Artisans of Leisure arranges bespoke family heritage and spiritual-focused trips

Artisans of Leisure is a New York-based luxury travel company specializing in exclusive, customized private tours. They offer the opportunity to trace family and religious heritage, with around-the-clock support in each destination during a personal DNA journey. Private, luxury tours are crafted around each client’s genealogical interests.

“We arrange a variety of experiences that are personalized, based on what is meaningful for each traveler,” said Ashley Ganz, founder and CEO of Artisans of Leisure.

“Travelers who come to Artisans of Leisure would only consider a private tour because it allows them to focus entirely on their own spiritual, religious or genealogical interests. Whether it’s visiting a sacred site, having private access to a renowned religious site, meeting one-on-one with a spiritual leader or expert, or exploring their family roots and needing access to people and records, our tours are designed to provide exactly what an individual traveler wants out of the trip.”

The company’s in-house travel experts remain actively involved with prominent genealogical and lineage organizations in order to help families connect with their roots. Bespoke visits to ancestral villages and places related to births, marriages and important life events can be arranged, as can private meetings with local archivists and genealogy specialists.

Clients who want to tour places of worship, museums, migration museums, emigration centers and the like can do so privately, and Artisans of Leisure arranges for personal guides to immerse guests in the culture, history and traditions of each ancestral country.

Additional touches include personal drivers, luxury hotels, and around-the-clock support in each destination.

“It means different things to each traveler,” said Ganz of the personal heritage experience.

“Some people are interested in connecting with their family’s history and heritage. For others, religion is part of a lifelong journey, and they want a custom tour to enhance their personal development. Other travelers are curious about history, religious beliefs, and how life and spirituality have been explained and given meaning by different cultures throughout human history – they are motivated by curiosity and a more scholarly approach.”

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