One humid January morning in Chennai, I slipped into the city’s historic Armenian Church just after dawn, the scent of jasmine garlands still lingering in the stone courtyard. I had visited before, but that morning I paused at a wooden table strewn with brittle baptism registers bound in cracked leather. The caretaker, a soft-spoken man in a neatly pressed shirt and trousers, was helping a visitor from the UK turn the fragile pages. As I drew close, I heard him read an entry aloud. Then the visitor straightened, eyes bright with disbelief, and cried, “I’ve found my great-great-great-grandfather!” His voice echoed off the ancient walls. The joy on his face was electric. In that instant, dusty church records embodied living bridges between past and present, yet outside that small vestry, few in India even imagined such pilgrimages could happen here.
Models of Genealogy Tourism
Across the globe, ancestry travel has become a thriving niche. In County Cork, Ireland, the heritage centre at Cobh guides visitors through parish records and ship manifests, before they retire to local bed-and-breakfasts run by families who trace their roots to the Great Famine exodus. In the Scottish Highlands, specialised operators sell DNA-informed weekends that pair guided trips to clan cemeteries with croft visits, whisky tastings and workshops in Gaelic storytelling. Tiny hamlets, once dark in winter, now thrive year-round on the patronage of heritage travellers. In Germany, regional heritage societies curate multi-day genealogy circuits, restoring vellum-bound church registries and escorting guests to ancestral town halls and family homesteads. Italy’s national roots-tourism programme, ‘Turismo delle Radici’, invites descendants of emigrants to explore ancestral towns, civil registries and family traditions through curated itineraries and local partnerships—generating cultural renewal and economic uplift across regions long overlooked by mainstream tourism.