For most of us, the word 'vacation' may mean images of leisurely, carefree days at the beach sipping umbrella drinks. But according to a published research by a University of Illinois expert in tourism and recreation, genealogical tourism is one of the fastest growing markets in vacation travel because it represents a conscious shift away from relaxation and into the realm of personal enrichment and fulfilment.
The increased popularity of genealogical tourism just shows the contemporary tourists' preference for authentic, lived experiences over the bubble-like environment of an all-inclusive resort or a pleasure cruise, says the recreation, sport and tourism expert Carla Santos, adding that Genealogical tourism provides an irreplaceable dimension of material reality that’s missing from the postmodern society.
Travelling to the old church where one's great grandparents used to worship in some rural outskirts, or buying a loaf of bread from a tiny grocery store in the village where one's grandmother lived, and such similar trips create a critical space to imagine and feel life as a form of continuation. The study also asserts that the popularity of genealogical tourism is due to living in a world where mediated, inauthentic experiences have become such an ingrained part of everyday life that we're almost unaware of it!
The new face of tourism is partly due to the increasing sociological awareness of the post-industrial society that we currently live in. With tourism studies developing a more sophisticated interpretative paradigm, more meanings of tourism have been discussed in academia, including the hunt for exoticism and experiencing nostalgia.
According to the research, the baby boomer generation now constitutes the primary profile of genealogical travellers. Also, aging plays an important role in defining a person's choice of tourism, and genealogical travel is contemporary society's way of attaining a more coherent and continuous, albeit imagined, view of ourselves in connection with the past. Travelling to identify with an unknown past seems to give existence to meanings and values that the individual then carries forward on into their present. Since diaspora is a ubiquitous condition in multicultural countries, 'our ancestors' past seems less retrievable and almost mythical.
Genealogical tourism also serves as a 'communicative platform' for our doubts and fears about our hyper-connected world. Not only does it help to mitigate the desires and anxieties about our age, genealogical tourism also encourages us to take a more humanistic approach toward issues of belonging, home, heritage and identity, believe experts.
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