Heritage Travel
Can you actually visit the village your family came from?
I've done this in my own family's country, in my own language. That's why I know what the day actually feels like — and why I plan these journeys anywhere in the world, not just mine.
I got my DNA results. What now?
An ethnicity percentage tells you a region; a journey needs a town. The work between those two things is research — parish books, emigration records, census entries, and increasingly the DNA match lists that lead to living relatives still in the country. That's where planning starts, not with a booking.
Where in the world can we do this?
Effectively anywhere. Through my partnership with Kensington Tours, I arrange private-guided heritage journeys worldwide — Scotland, Ireland, England, Germany, Poland, Italy, Ghana, Japan and beyond — with private guides and drivers, genealogy-informed itineraries, and handcrafted routes at luxury standard. Born in Budapest, I bring first-hand insider knowledge to Hungarian and Central European trips: the archives, the villages, the wine cellars, and the private moments most itineraries miss. I speak Hungarian, so nothing gets lost in translation. That's my own experience of doing this — not the limit of where I plan it.
What do you need before we can plan anything?
Less than most people assume. A surname, an approximate region, and a rough emigration decade is usually enough to begin. We start with a consultation, map your family story, then design the journey around what the research turns up.
What if all you have is a surname and a country?
That's a perfectly normal starting point. Names change spelling at the border, villages get absorbed into larger towns, and dates blur across generations. Narrowing a surname and a country down to a specific parish is exactly the kind of work a professional researcher does before anyone books a flight.
Do the records still exist, and who can read them?
Often yes — but not always online, and rarely in English. Kensington Tours works with AncestryProGenealogists, Ancestry.com's professional research arm, so a genealogist can access non-digitised archives in-country, run cemetery and parish searches, and shape the itinerary around what they actually find. Many archives and record offices require appointments and credentials; arranging that access in advance is the single most practical thing a planned journey does for you.
What does a heritage day on the ground actually look like?
A private guide and driver, the village your family left, the church or synagogue where they were married, the cemetery, the land, and often a meal with people who still live there. The food and the language of your ancestors, with someone alongside you who makes it personal rather than procedural.
What if the village is gone, or the borders moved?
Borders shifted across the twentieth century in Poland, Ukraine, the Balkans, Germany and Hungary, and the village your grandmother named may now sit in another country under another spelling. Sometimes the settlement itself no longer exists. We plan around the land, the region and the surviving community — tracing that shift is part of the work, not a complication.
What if we find nothing — or find something difficult?
Both happen. For African-American families, records frequently stop at the 1870 census; for Jewish families, wartime destruction is common. A journey can still be built on region, community and place when the paper trail ends. And if the research surfaces something hard, you inherited a family history — not moral responsibility for it. I build space around those days rather than scheduling straight through them.
Can the whole family come?
Yes, and three generations travelling together is one of the better reasons to plan properly rather than improvise. The challenge is pacing — so the grandchildren aren't spending a fourth day in an archive. That's a design problem, and it's solvable.