No one has any doubt that Catalonia’s tourist charms are top-notch. In addition to the beauty of its landscapes, the richness of its artistic, cultural and historical heritage and its extraordinary culinary offer, there is a new attraction that is increasingly attracting many tourists. For several years now, interest in the origin of our ancestors has become an international affair and thousands of people cross all kinds of borders to discover their family origins. It is what is beginning to be known as genealogical tourism.
At the Alt Empordà Regional Archive, its manager, Èrika Serna, receives several inquiries every month from all over the world interested in finding out if their lineage comes from any part of the Empordà. After some questions, and after guiding the archivist on what were the traces left by his ancestors, Serna instructs the consultants on how to approach the investigation. “The origin of the requests is very wide and we receive them from Northern Catalonia to America, from many descendants who went to try their luck in Cuba or Argentina”, he explains.
The emigrant spirit that Spanish society has had throughout history can be seen in the growing interest in family origins that archives receive. “The first question we all ask ourselves is who we are and where we come from and, after all, that’s what people do when they go to our archive”, confesses the researcher.
Those interested are people who take advantage of their holidays to discover the territory and allocate a day or two to visit these three documentaries and the places where their ancestors lived. “They not only aim to discover their origin, but also to discover the territory where their ancestors lived”, says the archivist.
The tourists are pulling the strings and “they are excited to see how their old relatives are recorded in documents such as the population register”, says Serna, who adds that on many occasions the visit ends at the cemetery, when they discover where they were buried.
Eduard Armengou and Joaquim Sangrà are two fans of genealogy who decided to invest in research in this field. So they created Turisgen, a non-profit organization that provides genealogical studies capable of going back up to five or six generations on average. And that’s not all, this tandem also offers a series of tourist routes in the form of guided tours of those areas, places, farmhouses, towns and cities with which their ancestors had some relationship. “A very interesting way to discover the territory and those corners that once meant something to our relatives”, explains Armengou. The routes they offer depend on the nomadic spirit of the individuals and the number of corners where they interacted.
The requests they receive, in equal parts between direct orders and gifts for friends or family, are delivered within a year, after consulting documentary sources, such as notary archives, town halls, agrarian chambers, civil records and parish documents .
And among so much research it is not surprising that Armengou and Sangrà have come across interesting anecdotes that reveal the importance of some family members. “It’s common for someone to come to us with the intuition that an ancestor of theirs got in touch with the nobility of the time and give us some clue as a starting point and manage to figure it out.” And it is in these cases when, in effect, it can be discovered that a great-great-grandfather was butler to King Sol at the French court itself or that some descendants of another client were the last landlords of Serrallonga, the well-known Catalan bandit.
“Family heritage is lost as people disappear”, so they encourage all those who show some concern about their origins to recover their memory and honor their ancestors, as if it were an immaterial good, since they have helped shape the individuals we have become.
