Ancestry Magazine

Lilian Hough inherited a number of things from her dad—her eyes, her laugh, her smile. But her favorite inherited feature is her love of the outdoors. Before she could even read, Lilian’s dad had her learning to ski in the winter and hiking near their Vienna home in the summer. The pair stayed active together, even across miles, well into Lilian’s adulthood.

That all stopped when Lilian’s father died in January 2006. For months, Lilian moped around, “just being depressed,” she says. Then she found a way to deal with her dad’s death without pushing away his memory—a month-long trek through the Himalayas. The same trek her dad had taken 30 years before.

Heritage travel is nothing new. But retracing an ancestor’s 130-year-old archeological journey or a hike to the world’s highest peaks in the name of family history is. This is extreme heritage travel—trips that focus not on old homes or towns but on old passions, interests, hobbies, and quests. And it’s becoming more and more popular with a new generation of family historians.

Take James Frankham, a New Zealander who grew up hearing stories about a remarkable trip taken by his granddad Eric Lane.

Grandpa Eric’s adventure took place back in 1936. Business was booming in Japan at the time, and Eric was assigned to a job in Tokyo. While there, he took advantage of the picturesque, and nearly untouched, landscapes, hiking through the Japanese Alps, taking photographs and recording memories that would eventually help him share his once-in-a-lifetime experience with family.

Years later, those photos became both the inspiration and the motivation that convinced James to relive the journey. “Granddad was always very careful with his photographs,” says James, “and he took great care with the captions. We’d always look at them together as a family. I thought I’d recreate the journey using his pictures.”

But photos alone weren’t enough. James started reading his granddad’s diary to map out the trip. He’d then return to that well-worn photo album to “go through the whole thing,” says James. “I did all I could: wrote down names of all the places in his captions and then used the Internet to look them up.” But all of that studying still didn’t prepare him fully for the journey. “It wasn’t until we got there that things started to come together,” he says.

The Preparation
You can’t just call a travel agent to arrange a historic reenactment—trips like these take time and preparation.

Like James, Lilian Hough also grew up watching slides from her dad’s trek. Throughout his four-month-long 1972 journey through the Himalayas, her dad kept a daily journal of sorts—letters to Lilian’s mom. His writing detailed everything: how he felt, what he ate, the villages he passed through, and the peaks he climbed. After her dad died, Lilian read and studied them all.

Lilian knew, however, that having only the pull of an ancestral spirit as her guide wouldn’t be enough. From her home in New York, she discovered that her second cousin was leading a group through the Himalayas. After a little more research, she realized the group was going to take almost the identical trek that Lilian’s father had made 34 years earlier. And, as luck would have it, the group had one spot still open for the trip. Lilian signed on.

For the first time in her life, she hired a trainer. “It was hard to train in New York,” Lilian said. She’d be hiking over 155 miles at elevations exceeding 20,000 feet—the equivalent of scaling 130 Statues of Liberty set atop each other. On weekends she took the subway north for small hikes through the Appalachians, loading her backpack with water bottles and anything heavy she could find. Even for a very active person, the regimen was a struggle. But it was something Lilian felt she had to do, something she owed her dad.

The Preamble
“Our family is made up of great record keepers,” says Lucy McCauley, confirming that this breed of heritage travel wouldn’t be possible without notes from the past. Notes, in fact, were what initially drew Lucy to a long-ago trip made by her great-great-uncle Francis H. Bacon.

The trip took place back in 1878 when Uncle Frank and a companion, Joseph Clark, took a 17-month sailing adventure through the rivers and seas of Europe, searching for an excavation site for the fledgling Archeological Institute of America. Detailed notes and sketches from Uncle Frank’s travel log were published in an archeological magazine at the turn of the century. “We had a copy of that issue lying around the house, and I would always look at it, with all these beautiful watercolors and sketches he made along the way. I remember being intrigued by Assos, Turkey,” says Lucy of one of the sites her uncle had written about. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great to go to this particular dig, one he actually worked on?”

When she heard that a professor at Istanbul University had started that dig again after a century of abandonment, Lucy started making some calls. “[The professor] had read [Frank’s writings], and it inspired him to resume this dig. Since I was a descendant, he said I’d be most welcome to come, and he’d put me to work.” And work she did.

Armed with some travel gear, her uncle’s travel log, and his monograph about the dig itself, Lucy set off for Turkey. “I arrived at Assos at night. It was such a magical place. I walked out to the water, looked to the sea, and just imagined my uncle arriving at the same harbor and docking.”

Once there, she discovered how precise Uncle Frank really was. “They had remeasured the site [100 years later] using modern equipment, and it was precise to my uncle’s measurements. He was such an amazing record keeper. He documented everywhere he went and lived. In his old age, he even made a timeline of his life.”

All of that precise documentation helped Lucy more than she could have ever realized before starting the trip. “In Troy [another ancient site Uncle Frank had visited] I met up with some cousins who were also traveling in Turkey, and we came upon this fig tree that looked very old,” says Lucy. It was located adjacent to the excavation pit her uncle had pointed out very specifically in his journal. The group soon realized this was likely the very same tree Uncle Frank had eaten lunch under one afternoon. “He talks about it [in his journal]—that particular tree next to that pit. We just got a chill, all of us, being there in the very same spot.”

The Payoff
Every trip is different. But whether 30 years or 130 years apart, what was a life-changing experience for one person long ago still has the potential to be life changing for a new generation of visitors today.

For Lilian, the best part of the trip was the connection it gave her to her father. “One of the things I made him promise me [before he died] was to come visit me on the mountain tops,” she says. Both during and after the journey, Lilian felt more at peace with her dad’s death. And even now, she still feels closest to him when she’s in the mountains, whether trekking through the Himalayas, hiking the Cascades, or skiing back east.

Like Lilian, both James and Lucy discovered that reading and looking through old photos could never replace the hands-on adventure. Once he arrived in Japan, James showed some of his grandfather’s photographs to local park guides who were able to point out “exactly where to go,” says James. “Some of the guides even recognized some of the people my granddad photographed over 70 years ago.”

It was, says James, “a pilgrimage of sorts—to walk up a valley and back in time through a landscape of photographs, to remember my granddad, and by following his route, perhaps get to know him better. I never really considered him as a young guy. He was always Granddad, inflicted with a limp.” As he climbed the exact same mountains and saw the exact same sites 70 years later, James’s view of his granddad changed. “I got to reinvent him—see him in a different light.”

Says Lucy, “The whole trip made me realize how permeable time can feel, that I was somehow connected through time to this ancestor—in a way that I haven’t felt connected to any others.” She sees real value in retracing an ancestral adventure. “You set out with a whole batch of questions, and you return with new ones to answer,” she says—a wonderful cycle. And just knowing that you’re walking in the footsteps of your personal history makes you feel closer to the past, surer about every step you took and every step you’re about to take. Says Lucy, “I felt at times as if [Uncle Frank] were whispering in my ear, trying to send me messages.”

Sidebar:
It’s Not Always the Same
By nature’s watch, a couple of centuries isn’t a long time. But still, don’t be disappointed when your experience doesn’t exactly mimic your ancestor’s.

When James Frankham retraced his grandfather’s trek through the Japanese Alps, he chose spring rather than Granddad’s summer. After following a photographic path that his granddad took, James and his company came to a trail that was snowed in. “It was sort of anticlimactic, arriving there. The conditions were very different, and it was hard to realize we could follow him no further. It was disappointing in one sense, but in another sense it was a nice departure. I wasn’t only retracing his steps, but I was making my own roots as well.”

Lilian Hough’s trip also included its fair share of departures from her dad’s trip 30 years prior. But one of those departures was especially memorable—and intentional. Each night, when the group sat down to eat dinner, Lilian read aloud from her father’s journal. One entry spoke of Pacharmo, a place her father was excited to climb, but, for various reasons, was unable to. Lilian and other members of the group were determined to climb the peak for him. The hike was bitterly difficult. After four hours of intense hiking and low oxygen levels, Lilian considered turning around. “Then I saw the people who were ahead of me cheering because they were at the top, and I got totally emotional,” said Lilian. “I was almost there and yet I could barely walk one step more. I started thinking of my dad and between the little air there was and my emotions, I was gasping. But then I got to the top, and it was great. … My cousin came up behind me and said, ‘You did it for your dad.’”