When travel’s in your blood
DNA kits are opening up whole new worlds
Manuel Maqueo grew up in Mexico. Throughout his childhood, his parents and grandparents told him they had relatives in Italy, Portugal and Africa.
But details were scant, and he had no official records.
Then Maqueo saw a YouTube video made by travel search engine Momondo offering to send contest winners throughout the world to learn about their ancestry. “How amazing would it be to know where I come from and to go there, see people of those places, taste their food, listen to their music, laugh with them?” Maqueo, 28, says.
He applied and won an Ancestry DNA kit. All he had to do was spit into a tube, and within weeks an analysis of his background was sent to him. He was surprised to find that even though he grew up in Mexico, he is not even half Mexican. He is 47% Native American. The rest of his genealogy comes from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania, which includes Australia.
“I was shocked,” he says.
The do-it-yourself DNA testing market has exploded in recent years. Kalorama International, a Maryland-based research firm, expects sales to hit
$350 million by the end of the decade. Companies such as Ancestry and
23andMe have seen increases; 23andMe now has more than 3 million users.
Consumers have turned to the home testing kits for various reasons, from trying to find out more about medical problems to screening potential dates. Now, they are increasingly using them as travel planning tools.
“It’s thematic travel,” says Per Christiansen, vice president of brand marketing for Momondo. “A few years ago people traveled based on historic events, and now people want to travel based on their history.”
Go Ahead Tours, a company that offers guided travel itineraries, recently partnered with Ancestry to design heritage trips. The partnership already has produced itineraries to Ireland, Italy and Germany for 2018.
“Genealogical adventurers,” as Go Ahead is calling them, will receive an AncestryDNA kit. Before the trip, they will discuss their results with an expert from AncestryProGenealogists, another division of Ancestry. The journey will be led by a local tour director and an Ancestry genealogist.
Your Travel Services, a full-service travel agency based in South Carolina, has DNA Journeys Specialists who customize trips specific to the heritage of their clients. The itinerary includes stops to their hometowns, visits to records offices and other excursions.
“Knowing is one thing, but experiencing is totally different,” says Jennifer Horan of Your Travel Services. “How wonderful to be able to help someone discover their history and explore a part of the world that they’ve never been to.”
The specialist also will help clients locate living relatives. Some have even stayed in their homes. But it is up to travelers to decide how much information to divulge or receive.
Horan herself has taken a DNA journey. She was born in Charleston, W. Va., but she learned that her ancestors came from the United Kingdom, Spain, Morocco, Germany and Central Europe.
She traced her British ancestry to the 1400s. Her predecessors were the Throckmortons, who had ties to King Henry VIII. One Throckmorton, Elizabeth, married Sir Walter Raleigh.
In September, Horan went to Alcester to visit Coughton Court, the family home of the Throckmorton family. She visited the graves of forefathers. She also went to the home of Raleigh and Throckmorton in Sherborne.
She made a stop in London, where she toured the Tower of London. Queen Elizabeth I did not approve of Raleigh’s marriage to Throckmorton and sent them both to the Tower for a time. “There’s positive and negative in everyone’s history,” Horan says.
She returned to the USA aboard the Cunard Queen Mary 2. “I wanted to sail trans-Atlantic back the U.S. like a lot of immigrants did to see the Statue of Liberty,” she says.
Maqueo is spending a year traveling around the world after winning the Momondo journey. He has gone to Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Tanzania, Thailand, Cambodia and Australia.
Says Maqueo, “This journey, at least for me, has just started.”