I am studying genealogy at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies in affiliation with the Continuing Education, University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto. I am presently in my second year of studies. I am a member of the National Genealogical Society as well as member of several other genealogical societies.

The Globe and Mail, 10 September 1997, p. A610

More take trips to trace ancestry
BY DOROTHY LIPOVENK

A copy of an 1861 English census turned out to be the road map Les Campbell needed to guide him home.

In June, the 42-year-old Edmonton man returned home to the deserted village of Arderey in the Scottish Highlands to stand on the ancestral soil of a great-great-great grandfather,

"I cant believe I ever got this far," said Mr. Campbell, a marketing representative for John Deere Ltd., marvelling at his luck in locating relatives in Yorkshire, whose copy of census capped his search for his forebears birthplace. Les Campbell of Edmonton searched the Alberta archives for family photos in a heritage quest that led him to a deserted village in the Scottish Highlands. (SIMA KHORRAMI/Globe and Mail)

There's a sense of completeness, just standing there in the ruins of where he lived and walked.

Mr. Campbell, who had been sleuthing in archives for clues to his family history since 1995, is not alone in making a roots journey overseas. A growing fascination with genealogy is spurning family members to return to the town and villages of their ancestors; "where it all started," as Mr. Campbell says, or where it ended for many families who fled or perished in the Second World War.

Cecile Skene, of the Canadian Federation of Genealogical and Family History Societies in Winnipeg, noted an upswing in roots journey in the past five years, particularly among people who have researched their genealogy for at least a decade.

"They're not only going as tourists but knocking on doors" of long-lost cousins," she said.

A poll by St. Louis-based Maritz Market of Americans involved in genealogy found that just over 45 per cent have traveled to an ancestral home town or country. The largest proportion of root travelers were middle-aged, with more than half of respondents 45 to 54 years old having made the journey.

Stanley Diamond, president of Montreal's Jewish Genealogical Society, suggests that recent changes in the political structure of Eastern Europe and the easing of access to archival records there have encouraged descendants to visit.

Many go alone or are accompanied by a parent who survived the Holocaust.

Toronto lawyer Dorothy Wall, 48, made the trip to her mothers birthplace, Zwollen, Poland, with her mother two years ago while on a Jewish heritage tour of Warsaw, Cracow and the Treblinka death camp.

On the day trip to Zwollen (a two-hour drive from Warsaw),they encountered several people who remembered their family including one resident over 90 who supplied an approximate date when members of her mothers extended family were sent to Treblinka, where they perished.

Other, less painful, memories were revived too. The two women walked around the town, stopping at her mothers old public school and the town square that was still familiar.

"It was evocative of her history, her world prewar," Ms. Wall said, describing the experience as " meaningful."

Ms. Walls sojourn is typical. "People go back to the town they're most familiar with" from the stories they have been told, said Mr. Diamond, referring to whether descendants opt to visit the ancestral home of their mother or father.

Finding people who knew your family can be difficult part of a roots journey, according to Beverley Trace of the 900-member Alberta Genealogical Society. She said these trips are "very common" and at least six members of thesociety's Edmonton branch flew overseas this summer.

"It's certainly something that people really dream of doing," Mrs. Trace said.

But whether or not they can locate an informal town elder, roots travelers will use even the scarcest information in their quest. Sometimes its no more than a scrap of paper with a relatives name, said Eli Rubenstein, national director for the united Israel Appeals march of the Living to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in eastern Europe.

He said that people who take part in these marches, many of them students, often take side trips to towns in Hungary or Poland " to retrace the steps their ancestors may have taken."

Many have never met relatives who died in the Holocaust, so "this is the closet they can come to connect" with them, he added.

Rivka Augenfelds parents survived a year of the war as partisans in the forest. Eager to get a sense of their younger lives, Ms. Augenfeld first went to her fathers birthplace, Warsaw, and then spent a week in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where her mother was born and raised when the city, then known as Vilna, was part of Poland between the two world wars.

Ms. Augenfeld tried to "get a sense of the physical place" her mother "had lived and loved very much" by retracing her steps as a young girl, such as the route shed taken to school. At one point, on a visit to an area museum, Ms. Augenfeld was startled to find her mothers face staring at her from a pre-war photograph of students in a science lab.

"It became more real to me how they [her parents] lived and survived," Ms. Augenfeld said of her journey, which she made in the spring of 1993 as part a trip to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

And she credits an old partisan friend of her parents, who served as her guide, for the success of the trip to her mothers birthplace.
Related Web site

Canadian Genealogy Resource
The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario)

10 September 1997, p. A6

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