Existential Genealogy?

While reviewing the science news for the day I came across an intriguing article (really!) describing a study by Professor Carla Almeida Santos and her graduate student Grace Yan entitled "Genealogical Tourism: A Phenomenological Examination" (Journal of Travel Research 2010; 49; 56 originally published online 24 February 2009; DOI: 10.1177/0047287509332308). While the article itself is quite learned (and a bit inaccessible for the uninitiated) I found some of the interpretations of their work by the authors themselves to be quite insightful and in good agreement with my own existential experiences and feelings as an amateur genealogist.

A few worthwhile quotes from the authors press release describing their work:

"Genealogical tourism provides an irreplaceable dimension of material reality that's missing from our postmodern society," Santos said.

"Traveling to the old church where one's great grandparents used to worship in rural Ireland, or buying a loaf of bread from a tiny grocery store in the village where one's grandmother was from in Greece create a critical space to imagine and feel life as a form of continuation," says co-author and U. of I. graduate student Grace Yan.

"Genealogical tourism capitalizes on this (a world where mediated, inauthentic experiences have become such an ingrained part of everyday life that we're almost unaware of it) by allowing individuals to experience the sensuous charms of antiquity, and provides a way of experiencing something eternal and authentic that transcends the present," Santos said.

"According to our research, the baby boomer generation now constitutes the primary profile of genealogical travelers," Yan said. "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."

"Diaspora definitely plays an important role in popularizing genealogical tourism," Santos said. "Individual cultural and ethnic identities exist in fragmented and discontinuous forms in the U.S. Traveling 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 our multicultural country, "our ancestors' past seems less retrievable and almost mythical," Yan said.

"A lot of us may feel that there's a tension between the need to feel connected and the need to be individualistic," Santos said. "Genealogical travel gives us a practical way to explore those feelings and move toward a deeper understanding of our identities."

"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," she said.