Ancestral Tourism
On behalf of Moray Council Valerie Wardlaw, the new Visitor Development Officer, organised an ancestral tourism training course at Moray College on 9th May to provide guidance to representatives of Moray and Banff Museums and Library Service in this Year of Homecoming. Joan Taylor, Peggie Gordon and Mary Kean were there from the Friends of the Falconer Museum along with fifteen others to hear what Cameron Taylor had to tell us. We spent an interesting and informative day.
The main theme was to discuss what it is that ancestral tourists want to find out and how we can help them in their search, what can be done in our individual museums and where visitors can be directed to find more detailed information than we are able to supply. They have to accept that it is not in our remit to start searching the internet on their behalf to build up a family tree, but that we can provide general website information and addresses to enable them to do that for themselves, and tell them how to find churchyards and cemeteries, for example, which can be a fruitful source of information for people who have some knowledge of where their forebears came from. It was suggested that hotels and B&Bs could be encouraged to provide that kind of information too since they are more readily available than museums with their restricted opening hours.
It gave us plenty of food for thought and before the end of the training some of us were already trying some of the websites on the lecture-room computers to see what kind of things we could find. The information is all there: it just needs time to ferret it out and it is up to us to make as many people as possible aware of the fact.