In 2003, when Rani Shankar, a New York-based healthcare professional and midwife, got the chance to work with Belaku Trust, an NGO in Bengaluru, she was drawn to it for both personal and professional reasons. “It was a great opportunity to work in rural Karnataka on maternal health, but I was also motivated by a curiosity about my identity,” she says.
Born to an American mother and Indian father, Shankar grew up in North Carolina where she did not get a lot of exposure to Indian culture. “My dad moved to the US in the ’60s, during a time when assimilation was the goal of most immigrants. Multiculturalism wasn’t really a thing in North Carolina back then.” This feeling also informed her choice to take a trip with friends across Rajasthan, which deepened her connection to India. Her desire to experience her culture in a more meaningful way is part of a growing trend in the country — genealogy-focussed travel.
Back in time
While Shankar charted her own way, many are turning to professionals, from travel agents to websites like Ancestry and 23andMe. A cursory search online reveals hundreds of sites and blogs on the subject. The India Family History page on Ancestry.com alone throws up thousands of record collections and resources, from births in 1786 to marriages in 1948.
Karan Anand, Head of Relationships at travel company Cox & Kings, attributes the trend to the increasing need to feel a sense of belonging, coupled with a feel-good factor. “The number of second and third-generation Indian origin people residing abroad has increased. They do not have too many connections with the country, except through their family or community events. Now, as we live in an interconnected and interdependent world, they are curious to know more about India,” he says.
Anand notes that when people plan these trips, they also like to include local experiences. “Close to 20% of our trips recently have been genealogy-themed, and this is rising. The most visited sites are the Golden Triangle — Delhi, Agra and Jaipur — with an almost equal number to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, followed by the Northeast,” he adds.
In the West, families have been heading out in search of their roots for a couple of decades now. Mary O’Brien Hetland, an Arizona-based former teacher, describes her six-week trip with her sisters in 1998 to Ireland — prompted by her family’s Sunday afternoon reminiscences of their homeland — as “passionate and emotive”. “I believe my Irish grandparents moved to Chicago in the early 1900s. They came to the US for the usual reasons: to support their families back home and to have better opportunities,” she says. “We wanted to see the sights and scenery, since we had been exposed to it by our aunts and grandparents through Irish literature, music, dance and books,” she says, adding, “I felt a deep sense of kinship and caring. I really had a sense of being accepted into a larger clan.”
Caught in the web
According to James Derheim, owner of European Focus, a US-based travel agency that specialises in European heritage tours, the internet has amped up the growth of genealogy-based travel. His own journey began in the 1980s, as a photojournalist for the US Army. “I was working for a daily newspaper in Germany and remember seeing a road sign for a town called Bremen and wondering why it was so familiar. I called my mum and she said ‘well, that’s where your great-grandfather got on the boat to come to America’,” he recalls. Derheim took pictures of the town and put together a scrapbook for his grandfather’s 80th birthday. As he saw his family gather around it, he thought — this could be a business. Over the next few years, he travelled across Europe, built a tremendous image library — visiting over 2,000 locations to capture them — and gained customers in the US. With the internet, however, the need for pictures decreased and his business evolved into a travel agency. Today, he and his wife craft bespoke ancestral tours for their customers, averaging about 12 to 17 trips per season.
Elaine MacGregor, founder of Family History Tours Ltd, a UK-based agency that specialises in tours to the Indian subcontinent, also feels the internet’s role is striking. “The interest in family history, be it casual or serious, has grown enormously over the last 10 years, mainly because so much is now available to research from one’s own home,” she says. Her interest began because she was keen to learn more about the early lives of her parents who were born in Kolkata. After joining the Families in British India Society (FIBIS), she discovered she had six generations of families in the country, mostly soldiers. In 2007, she started her company to organise tours to India for other FIBIS members.
Worlds apart
FIBIS, along with the British Library India Records, is one of the routes UK-based Alan Stephenson used to trace his Anglo-Indian roots back to the 1800s, but he hit a brick wall after that. “I wanted to go further back, to find the European and Indian couple who started our Anglo-Indian line,” he says. To this end, he travelled to Chennai last year. With the help of Harry MacLure, editor of the magazine Anglos in the Wind, he got in touch with city resident Dominic Johnson who knew his way around government offices.
“My initial idea was to go hunting with the addresses I had discovered through my research. This was naïve because without Johnson, I would have stopped on my first day,” says Stephenson, who, faced with language barriers and bureaucratic hurdles, relied on his local guide’s knowledge and contacts to obtain his family’s records. “The most helpful were the Anglo Indians themselves, who were able to point us in the right direction. Parish records are vital to researchers, so getting a look at them is a big must if you want absolute answers, and, of course, always photograph the evidence, as you may not get a second chance,” he shares.
Designing your journey
With Ancestry.com and 23andMe coming out with DNA testing products, people are turning to science to discover their cultural heritage and to plan their trips. Jennifer Horan, Marketing and Business Development Head of US-based travel agency Your Travel Services, recently developed DNA Journeys precisely for this market. Customers start off with a DNA testing kit to determine their heritage, and later plan a customised vacation. Journeys include everything from visits to records offices to major tourist attractions. Horan, who undertook her own DNA journey to the UK and Norway, says there has been an uptick in genealogy travel for a slew of reasons. “Many times, the older generation wants to find a unique way to spend time with their family. Second, more travellers are looking for authentic and enriching experiences,” she says, adding that she was surprised to find she was a blend of German, Norwegian, English and Moroccan.