[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, I'm Sarah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm Megan.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're two women in our 40s who live in different states and have a lot of different interests between us.
[SPEAKER_01]: On this show, we talk about all the midlife lady leisure pursuits we're enjoying at this stage of life, like travel, hobbies, food, wellness, style, and more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sarah, I'm excited today to talk about my recent trip to Canada with Clara, where we researched our family's French Canadian ancestry.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to share what I learned about planning ancestry focused travel through that trip.
[SPEAKER_00]: But first, I need to give our exclusive season sponsor and our longtime partner, Vionic, a major shout out because, let me tell you, Sarah, I lived in my Vionic, while on that trip.
[SPEAKER_00]: I logged so many miles up and down.
[SPEAKER_00]: steep hills and hundreds of stairs on long historical walking tours in Quebec City in Montreal and my walk slim glide and uptown sneakers were in rotation, my feet felt great the entire time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they literally cute with everything I wore, whether it was a maxi dress for afternoon tea or just something casual for a museum tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that does not surprise me, Megan.
[SPEAKER_01]: And listeners, you're going to want to head to vionicshoes.com and use our promo code midlife.
[SPEAKER_01]: to get yourself a pair of sneakers perfect for a road trip.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll get 15% off with our code when you log into your account and be sure to check out the special page we've set up where you can see our favorite vionic styles.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can look for that in the show notes for this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Big thanks to Vionic for sponsoring this episode and now Sarah, let's dive into talking about this idea of ancestry travel.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know you have some questions that you're going to ask me that I can do my best to answer, but I guess I figured I would start just by talking a little bit about what this trip entailed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Clara and I went for two weeks to Quebec, we went to Quebec City, we went to Montreal.
[SPEAKER_00]: We went to multiple small towns and villages in between.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was kind of like a combination mom and daughter road trip.
[SPEAKER_00]: She, you know, she's 17.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's going into her senior year.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've never really done something like this together.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted to eat.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted to hang out.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted to have fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we also really wanted to research this kind of side of our family and
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, two, three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I'm talking about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was kind of what led to this trip, but the ancestry thing was not something I had really ever considered pairing with travel until a more recently and it was really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe one of the, it was a really amazing experience and I'm so glad we did it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a question about the teen daughter mother aspect of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: peaking Clara's interests about her own ancestors like prior to this trip like how did she feel about obviously she had a great time I know she got to eat all the poutine and yeah drink all the tea but like to what degree did you want to sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess prime her for the experience where she naturally curious there's just there's just a difference in a midlife lady interest in our ancestry and like the myopic Yeah, like the way teens are designed to care you live under percent and that's not it that's not a knock on clear at all
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and that was a big consideration while trying to kind of, like, almost like kill multiple birds with one stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I wanted to actually also check out the tea culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know French Canada, you wouldn't think of France or as having a particular tea forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: food culture, but because Quebec is such a melting pot, I did want that to be part of, you know, it's definitely a big interest of mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was like the tea part.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was Claire's interest in Putin and our shared interest in Panama, Chocolat.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was that like pastries in Putin.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a big focus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the ancestry, which honestly if I had done this trip alone or like with my sister, I think it would have looked very different.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: I did peek to answer your question, yes, I peeked her interest ahead of time by talking about like specific discoveries I was making, it helps that Claire as very interested in history and she's also very interested in languages.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I remember that about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that made this particular trip, I think
[SPEAKER_00]: just give it a little more of a hook for her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that they speak French all over this area of Canada, like that to her was very interesting and the fact that we could kind of look at that connection between French Canada and actually the homeland France and the fact that our people came from there and was able to kind of make some of those connections.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that kind of also peaked her interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were definitely things she just did not care about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had to figure out how to spend my time wasly and not become depressed because or frustrated because I wasn't getting everything done that I wanted to get done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing I mentioned to you is that Clara and I travel really well together because
[SPEAKER_00]: She, we both like to spend time together doing specific things, but we both also like to spend time apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I had plenty of time to like go out on foot and do stuff on my own while she slept in or hung out and did her teenage thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was kind of like not forcing the issue too much and just finding the things that would, would peek her interest, I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, it sounds like it was a perfect balance.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think as a mom of teenagers, I sometimes can feel
[SPEAKER_01]: Not self-conscious is the wrong word, but in mid-life, we like to geek out over all kinds of things that our kids have no interest in, and I think finding that accepting that that's okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like they do not need to care about the things we care about, but also then like you said, finding what do we do together, what is important enough that I wanna share this with her, because I want her to understand the importance of it, versus like, okay, you know, she's not gonna care about this as much as I do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just find all that interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think that too, there were surprises.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there were ways she got hooked that I could not have planned for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And could not have anticipated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had to be like open to those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I also had to realize at one point, like she does not care if we stop off at one more cemetery.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I can wander around seeing if this particular ancestor is here.
[SPEAKER_00]: She doesn't care.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which doesn't mean she'll sit in the car and wait for me
[SPEAKER_00]: in a good-natured way, it's not, I'm not cramping her style or like ruining her day, but I also maybe this isn't the trip for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're not going to convert her into that particular pattern.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she hasn't been doing all the research I have, either.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like I had for a little while, like a mission to find very specific names because I knew where they were, like I knew they were in these areas and it became almost like a hunt or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then finally, I thought this is not the time for the hunt and I don't even care anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like I've already loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've also lost along the way I had to do a lot of adjusting of my own expectations about what I'm actually there to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what did you actually do on the trip?
[SPEAKER_01]: In my memory, you drove far first and worked your way back.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, I really like maps and geographers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I had, you had to tell me where you were going and I had to look it up because I like to be able to picture it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you didn't grow up in Michigan like I did and particularly I think because I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in Susayne, where it is where the Sioux locks are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you don't know anything about that, you know, pause this or later, go look them up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's the, it's the, it's the lock system that made it possible for people to travel, ships to travel through the, the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
[SPEAKER_00]: through the St. Lawrence C-way to the St. Lawrence River, which goes all the way through Quebec.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then basically empties out into Lake Ontario.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is the passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to be able to travel through, to get to Lake Superior.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to be able to go through those lakes or through the locks.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew up learning about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence C-way and all of that factored very heavily into my childhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not know that I had all these hundreds of years of ancestors who lived along that river.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was kind of a cool discovery when I made it a couple of years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I decided to sort of
[SPEAKER_00]: Set up our trip to sort of trace that migration.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we drove like the first two days.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got all the way to Quebec City.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to say that was probably 15 hours of driving, but we broke it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we stopped twice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we stayed in Quebec City for three days and then we worked our way westward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like my ancestors would have done our ancestors would have done.
[SPEAKER_00]: We stopped in a couple of villages along the way between Quebec City and Montreal.
[SPEAKER_00]: We stayed in Montreal for three days.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, then, we basically made our way back through Ontario and back into Michigan.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we actually did, we stopped at, like I said, tons of cemeteries and old churches.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, really Quebec is very cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very historic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you're on these,
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a highway, I guess, called, I can't even pronounce this, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Shaman, duroy, and it's the king's highway.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called, and that's the one that kind of meanders along the St. Lawrence River.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's just all these little villages that at one point would have been farming villages and many still are.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they all, not all, but like 90% of them look old.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just have like old churches, old graveyards.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was a lot of that, and then in both Quebec City and Montreal, we had walking tours.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had at least one museum tour and one walking tour in each place that we went.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in Quebec City, it was one where we actually had sent
[SPEAKER_00]: our, um, a few things that we knew about our ancestry ahead of time and then a professional genealogist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Graceed our, like as many ancestors as they could find and then they set up a walking tour based around our specific ancestors.
[SPEAKER_01]: So is that I'm gonna stop you there?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, is that um, is that a line of work that some people are in combining the genealogy research with historical walking tours?
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, the only one I found, but if people are not doing this everywhere, they should be.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the thing that what really captured Clara, um, for this guy, his name was Xavier, is Abbey A. I guess would be how you'd say it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he was able to identify so many people that we are directly descended from, and then tell us really specific stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like your eight times great grandfather was convicted of sorcery, and you're
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, nine times great-grandmother went to court for this specific case, like because there's all these documents and records, and French Canadian ancestors are really interesting because the Catholic Church kept really good records, and because it's an area that was populated by such a small number of people, so like in the 1600s, basically I very small
[SPEAKER_00]: tried to settle the Quebec area and make it new France.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in 1760, lost to the British.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was no longer, you know, it was no longer French, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But in that 100, let's say 140 years or whatever, however long, I don't think it was that long, that this was really actively happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: basically those people ended up majorly populating Canada.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, it's like a very small pool of humans did a lot in a short time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of interconnections.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was able to identify like,
[SPEAKER_00]: well over a thousand ancestors, but then when he got rid of duplicates because a lot of them duplicate, they meet up in the same line down the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like 985.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's like 985 ancestors that they were able to identify and list for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a plaque in Quebec City that has 42 founding members of Quebec City and we're descended from 22 of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, but so is everyone else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, so is everyone who's French-Canadian can say the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, there was one guy who was really, really famous and 95% of French-Canadians can trace their ancestry back to this guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like tight, you know, it's like a tight, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of the many hundreds of thousands of people that have come out of this tiny little, like, explosion of people were all sort of related to each other in a way and we go back to a small pool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, that tour was awesome though.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he spent three and a half hours with us just walking us all around Quebec City, which also looks very, very old in very European.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I've never been to Europe, but I've seen seen pictures and like the architecture, the cobblestone streets, just like so many things about it felt so old world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that grabbed Clara.
[SPEAKER_00]: That really got her.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Montreal, we did more like a, just kind of a touristy walking tour, but that was also very cool because we also had a lot of people in Montreal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was just stopping into random places.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the last day we actually went to the house where, and this was in Montreal, the last day in Montreal, where in the 1600s these women who the king sent over
[SPEAKER_00]: For trappers who were hanging out in Canada with no women like needing to populate the new world Right so the king sends all these women over there was like 800 I think we have 42 ancestors on that list of 800 women so again a nice big chunk But this was the house that they basically stayed in while they learned how to be Pioneers wives because they came from cities
[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't have those skills.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't know how to live in a really cold environment, like all those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they lived in this house and they met husbands.
[SPEAKER_00]: They basically did speed dating, updating in this house, and most of them would meet in Mary-off in the month or two.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they would have 12 children.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they did a good job.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did what they were told to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were there to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those were kind of like the big highlights.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We went to, I think, after noon tea, like,
[SPEAKER_00]: four or five times, we went to, out to eat, we went to bakeries, we wandered, we just wandered around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was kind of a mix of formal, like when you have two weeks, you have a lot of time to do both.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had days where we did tour after tour, and then we had days where we didn't do much at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of late around.
[SPEAKER_00]: So both all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: How much prep did you do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what kind of prep did you do before hand?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then related, I'm sure you left a lot of things up to deciding once you're there in the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: So can you talk about both of those things?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this was the part where I think I learned a lot on this trip, but I would maybe, I'm not going to say do it differently next time, but like I think I would come in with a different set of expectations.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had done so much research on ancestry.com and just through, you know, finding my own family tree stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing I learned is that
[SPEAKER_00]: It took me like two years to do the amount of work that the professionals were able to do interesting at like in a week.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have all the databases they speak French, they know and what the tour guide was telling me and he's not the genealogist, he's the tour guide.
[SPEAKER_00]: he partners with a genealogist, but he's created this database and he said when you're so focused on one area, the same name has come up again and again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I look at your tree and I see this one name comes up, he's like, oh, I know that person already.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I can, I remember that story, it's in my, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, he can work very efficiently and I can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one thing I think
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though it's fun to do that kind of research on your own, there does come a point where it becomes overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm listening at lists of names and dates.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to make sense of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing it from afar, which is hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't speak the language.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have to translate everything through AI or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the whole thing becomes just so many moving parts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, that's not what it care about.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I've learned, I guess about myself is that I don't actually think I'm a genealogy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to be a genealogist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, that's not what I'm fine to find fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't try to solve the mystery of whether I'm related to this person or that one.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only interests me up to a point, because really what I'm interested in is the stories of how people lived, whether or not I'm even directly related to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because as the tour guide pointed out to us, you never know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, these could be people who were adopted, there could have been a adultery or rape, or, you know, like all kinds of reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone might be on your family tree that you're actually not even related to.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a certain amount of guess work and more like, oh, isn't it interesting that my collective ancestry tells the story of these people and how they wound up in this place?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's more interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now knowing that, I think I probably doing this kind of thing again would
[SPEAKER_00]: deemphasize all that ancestry.com research.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I would have set up more tours ahead of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I would have reached out for more professional help ahead of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I would have, I spent a lot of time reading, but the stuff I was reading was more academic in nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I would have spent more time just reading stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, novels, even.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, in that time, like, it's really a couple.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But like, I think I would have, and then I think, you know, to the second question, which is like, what do you decide in the moment?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, at least for me, until I see something, it doesn't really make sense to me anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like, I read a well-a-cathar book that was set in,
[SPEAKER_00]: 1600s go back city and I've read it twice and I think it's great.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like we'll look at there a lot But until I got there and laid my eyes on what that city actually looked like the book didn't make that much sense Yeah, you know it was like it was like a bad a fictional place or something and so then seeing it was like wow So I
[SPEAKER_00]: I did a lot of deciding on the ground to abandon certain ideas I had about what about like what I Thought we might spend time researching or if like I had a dead end at one point You know, I couldn't find a headstone in the cemetery.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would think, okay, well, that's not what I'm here for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What am I here for am I here?
[SPEAKER_00]: just to get a sense for this place or maybe reframe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm not going to find this particular ancestors headstone, but I know for sure they would have been in this cemetery because all these other families around them would have been their neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just because I can't find this particular headstone does not mean they weren't here or that they weren't buried here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a different
[SPEAKER_01]: matching up the actual factual details could make you miss the sort of immersive.
[SPEAKER_01]: vibes experience for lack of a better term, do you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it makes sense that you would have had to need, you would have needed to sort of toggle between those two things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, some of the historical touch points is what makes it meaningful, but if you're only fixated on the accuracy or the finding of those things, you might miss just a really cool place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right, and I think that was the on the ground decision making that I was doing was being like pivot pivot, you know, thought I was here for this, but this is not it and and also giving us both time she'd like get off of the itinerary and pop into a shop and
[SPEAKER_00]: be open to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm pretty good about that sort of spontaneity that's not hard for me necessarily, but then sometimes that there is that part of me that then feels disappointed that I didn't maximize or that I didn't do all the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's no way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't go to a place that took hundreds of years to become what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: and contained hundreds and hundreds of my ancestors and feel like you did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's things that are just lost to time that I'll never know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was kind of like, on the ground, I think I was deciding what moments were worth paying attention to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, what I was there for, like what is the point?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why am I here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you have either beforehand or during physical notebooks, notes, printouts, maps?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know everything exists in our phones and in our computers and obviously that was the nature of a lot of your prep and research.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I also wonder if there was any physical manifestation that either helped you before or during or to capture what you were learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: a couple of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did bring, I found a walking tour that someone wrote out of that will like have their book that I mentioned.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish I'd found something similar for Montreal because what I realized after I got to Montreal was, well actually no, it was after the tour with the guy in Quebec City.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I can tell you, I can tell you, I can tell you, I can
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of your ancestors went basically straight to Montreal.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't really spend a lot of time in Quebec City, because at the time, Quebec City was the bigger city.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just kind of assumed a lot of them were there, but a lot of them were sent further west to like, populate that area.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he didn't actually know a lot about Montreal because that's not his area of expertise But he basically was like you should do the same thing there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, I was not able to find someone Doing the same thing there, but I would have liked to do something similar, but yes, I had a printed copy Of this walking tour and it would say things like now walk down, you know walk down the steps at x At x street and you'll see the scene where This happens in the book and then walk down, you know walk down the street to your left and it was really like
[SPEAKER_00]: turn by turn instructions, which I really liked.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had the print out that the tour guide gave us of our genealogy and some of the specific stories it was all written in French.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was kind of decipherable.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, if you're a English speaker, you kind of can figure it out a lot of the times because a lot of the words are recognizable and these weren't, these were just like look quick little narratives with dates.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was able to kind of piece together with that meant for the most part.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was cool to have and then I did bring
[SPEAKER_00]: I did bring with me lots of pronounce of research.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had done.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't find it to be as helpful on the go as I thought it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing I thought was pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ancestry.
[SPEAKER_00]: has this little map feature on the apps.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go to your family tree, so so you've done the work to fill out a family tree or you've been invited to someone else's family tree, you can toggle to map view.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so as we were driving between Quebec City and Montreal, I was able to like at different villages look on the map and you can see the blue dot.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, where you are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just see if there were any historical events related to your family tree that happened in that area.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I could see I'd go into a little village and it would say 22, you know, historic events.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd look at it's like your eighth great grandmother was born here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and died here.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean I'm going to find any record.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I know they were born and died here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and there's the church and that church has been standing since 1720.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably that's where they got baptized because it's a tiny village, you know, so like it's Again, it's there's no it's also circumstantial.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not like direct evidence in all cases that they were in this place or that this is the specific place where they're buried But you can kind of piece together in here
[SPEAKER_00]: We can make assumptions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: That map view is really cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have not played around on ancestry at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I only know second hand from you and other people, but I'm very interested in maps in general.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like maps are what make me excited to travel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that would really like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like you said, you're going this way anyway, and to be able to see
[SPEAKER_01]: see it there as opposed to a list or some other format, a chronology that's really neat.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you would have loved the museums that we went into in both of the bigger cities.
[SPEAKER_00]: We went to some kind of historic museum and I think it was the one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the one in Quebec City had a whole exhibit of old maps, and it did the thing where like lays them over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can lay them over each other and see how they changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's always so funny to look at the early maps and to see how wildly off they were.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like, wow, they really
[SPEAKER_00]: they had a very the way Clara put it she said they just had a really whimsical way of looking at the world and it's very true like there would be little animals drawn all over them and you know fun literally q fonts and like this idea of this unknown world would just look like thick trees like endless forest to them was pretty cool but then in Montreal it's an active
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, archaeological site because there was a budget tunnels and stuff that this museum was built on top of and so you can go down into them in some cases.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been to other historical preservation sites like that and it's really, really cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it just it just puts you in touch with it in a way that and that was another thing that really lit up Clara like I feel like I don't know that I could have I don't know that I could have predicted like what would capture her but that kind of thing did for sure
[SPEAKER_01]: We took our kids to Europe a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's two and a half, three years ago now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the oldest would have been like 15.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I concur that you don't know what will,
[SPEAKER_01]: or catch their imagination, and it's really good not to assume, like, oh, they're teenagers, like none of this matters to them, because you just don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of the things you think that will blow their mind won't, that's kind of raising teenagers, too, but that's really great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, anything that surprised you in either direction, a pleasant surprise or a mild disappointment that you have not already touched on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I talked about the fact that I just did not find nearly as much individual physical evidence of my different ancestors that I hoped.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't find a single headstone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I didn't work that hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I would have with that many.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, different people that I could have been looking for, they were there for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it went to lots of cemeteries, but the, the ancestors I was really focused on going in were the ones that were way, way, way, way, way, way, far back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those mostly don't exist anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those burial grounds are gone now or got moved or they were like wooden crosses, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there were just two-daying many names when you got further, like the further down the road you get, the more names there are, I could be looking for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'd get to a cemetery and then it would feel like, how do I even, like, where do I begin?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was kind of where I decided to let that go.
[SPEAKER_00]: finding so many references to specific ancestors in history books, did not expect that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a huge park in Quebec City called the Plains of Abraham, and so Abraham was a farmer, and he would have been sent into, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: to this plot of land, I think the King gave him 600 acres or something like that in the 1600s and he was really associated with these planes, like people would see him out grazing his sheep and stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they became this piece of land, became associated with this guy Abraham Martin and then like a hundred years later that was the site of the battle where the French lost to the British.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now it's a major park.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm related to Abraham.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's my ancestor.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I didn't even think about that going in.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't have that expectation at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just like little things like that, there was lots of little moments of, oh, that's cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, how neat.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and oh, and we were able to find so there was another more recent ancestor our last ancestor on my
[SPEAKER_00]: mom's mom's mom's side.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my grandma's great grandma, Alita, and my grandma's grandma, Clara, isn't that also a fun little coincidence?
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not know that when I named Clara.
[SPEAKER_00]: They lived in Montreal.
[SPEAKER_00]: in the 1870s to like 1882 maybe, and then they moved to Michigan, and I was able to find the block they lived on, which has now been very redone.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't look anything like it did, but the parish church still stands.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's right around the corner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, you just, that's pretty recent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's within 150 years or so.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know for sure that this is where they went about their lives, and they did their, you know, they went to the market and like,
[SPEAKER_00]: didn't like they just did their lives here and that's really really cool and that's close enough that I feel I felt actually much more connected to Montreal.
[SPEAKER_00]: I expected to feel like just the feeling in my bones more about Quebec City but it was actually felt a little remote to me like a little removed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had a very uncanny sense in Montreal, like I had been there before.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really weird actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't expect that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of thought, oh, Montreal is going to be this big city.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to feel more modern and it does.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the area we were in was very kind of had sprung up, I think, in the 1800s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it really wasn't French.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was after British rule.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Quebec is still very French.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has a very French identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a huge Victorian influence there, so that mash-up was really cool, and that's the place that if you go for generations back, and my family, that's where they would have lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the time and the sensibility, I guess, they would have been living with, and that was a surprise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I just did a pleasant surprise.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't expect to feel that connected to that space.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's neat.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've mentioned a few things you learned or might do differently.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anything else, especially I'm thinking about people listening who want to do this kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anything else you do differently or will do differently?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that one thing I would have done is have...
[SPEAKER_00]: Like an anchor, what was really good about is in Montreal and Quebec City, we had at least one anchor event each day or one place I wanted to go each day and usually was more than that, but even if I had nothing else in the docket, it would be like, well at least today, I know we're gonna go to this museum or we're gonna go do this tour.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't do that with the villages in between, and I wish I had.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mostly I didn't because those kind of got booked later.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like filled in between The bigger stops and I didn't quite know what I was looking for, but what ended up happening is We would get to these little places and be like, okay, now what you know, and then it felt like a lot of work To try to figure it out on this spot.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have I think I would have given myself like at least one anchor every single day Even if we weren't in a place that felt like it had as much going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there was more than I thought
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a good travel planning north-star anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if it's not ancestry or genealogy travel, but just to kind of know why you're in a place or know what, like, the big rock is that day.
[SPEAKER_01]: So to speak, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But otherwise, no, I mean, you know, I think we balanced our time pretty well.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I was planning a trip by myself, it would look like a very different, but it wasn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, where are you going next?
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't imagine that you're done with this type of travel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So another thing that we learned while we were talking with Xavier is that there are another whole branch of our
[SPEAKER_00]: early early ancestors went to Nova Scotia in Acadia.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you know anything about Acadians, maybe you don't and I'll just tell people in case they don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason New Orleans is what it is in the Cagians, which everyone's heard of, those were French Canadians who got forcibly pushed out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, and that was more on the eat that was really far east so that would have been Nova Scotia and maybe new Brunswick.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not 100% sure if that was if if new Brunswick was considered a part of a cadia But it was a big it was a big group over on the east side.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was a cadia the name of the region or is it like that's the called the region?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they were considered acedians.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now there's a huge acedian culture that is in New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those would have been not my direct ancestors because I don't have any, I don't actually have any family from there, but their people, their maybe cousin, you know, like siblings, because families got split up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had multiple ancestors who, like,
[SPEAKER_00]: they were trying to push out and who instead went west.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there was a lot of movement at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would love to learn more about the Nova Scotia branch and I've also wanted to go to Nova Scotia forever because the Prince Edward Island and Anne of Green Gables.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it would be really fun, actually, to either go either alone or maybe with my sister, or somebody like a female friend or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, don't cut me out of here and go do kind of like a like an ancestry slash literature tour and I don't even think I don't think in Nova Scotia I would be that worried about Like finding historical sites related to my family I think I would make it a much more vibes like vibes based Experience but that I am now so
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm now so peaked about Canada and all the history there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, growing up in Michigan, I always thought of Canada as just sort of an extension of Michigan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, they were our... Backyard door neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of similarities.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would travel, I lived in a border town.
[SPEAKER_00]: So border towns feel very porous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you just kind of go back and forth.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was where our mall was and our roller rink.
[SPEAKER_00]: was in Canada.
[SPEAKER_00]: You went there to go out to eat.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just felt like going back and forth was just no big deal and I don't think I really grasped how much history there was and how much it's sort of mirrors the history of the United States that was happening on the east coast.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of like an extension of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also why people were traveling back and forth between, like during the revolution, why people were going into Canada.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they wouldn't have to choose sides.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there was so much happening and I just, it's like I knew it but I just didn't know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I don't feel like I know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: A couple of months ago, I read Margaret Atwood's memoir her ex, it's really more of an autobiography because it's pretty much like her whole, she's in her 80s, I think, and it's pretty much her whole life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's long and big and she's not even a writer that I feel particularly like attached to in any way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do love memoirs by writers and I was kind of on a string of memoirs and by writers and a friend told me that this was really good and I read the whole thing and I learned so much because she was born in the 30s Late 30s maybe maybe during World War II somewhere in there early 40s.
[SPEAKER_01]: She has memories from the 40s, so her childhood was in the 40s.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I just basically got like a crash course in more I would say like arts and culture Canadian history because she was from the very beginning, like part of the literary world in Canada and I just felt like which I think is really tight knit.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like, because it didn't really take off the only studied French and British literature in schools until like this I don't know some very late decade like the 70s and 80s.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, there really wasn't if you said Canadian literature Canadian writers or Canadian poet a Canadian filmmaker like it didn't that didn't really exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course people were making art.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, of course, all the way back.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as a thing that was taken seriously, she was kind of among these early sort of.
[SPEAKER_01]: people who did it anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: The point of that is I learned so much by waste by the wayside at least about 20th century Canada and that doesn't even count like everything you're talking about and I just felt like I should know this because it's all my stuff and our history.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like it really these two nations.
[SPEAKER_00]: grew up together, yeah, we don't always, I guess, I don't know, Americans as we know can be very America's centric.
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
[SPEAKER_01]: 100% 100%.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you might like this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I told you about it at one point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you did, I would try and post it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, near the Sue and her father was a naturalist, like a forester and a naturalist, so she literally grew up in the forests of Canada's pretty cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well Sarah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about my trip because I had such a great time, I loved it and maybe there's more ancestry travel for us both in the future not something I'm an expert in but I do think it's something where
[SPEAKER_00]: If this episode speaks to you and you think I would really, you know, like to plan something like that, shoot me an email, I'd be happy to tell you kind of how I got started.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also think this is the kind of thing you could just piece together on your own.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you don't have to have the idea can be, I'm going to go to a place that I know that my people come from and just feel the vibes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that can be ancestry travel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it doesn't have to be quite as granular and packed with data as ours was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll just do a reminder to everyone that you can find our expanded episode story with photos and links on Substack at midlifeladyleisurepresuits.substack.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will include lots of photos in this one, and that's also where you're going to find the special page we have set up with some of our favorite vionic styles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Use the promo code midlife at vionicshoes.com for 15% off.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for being here, everybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk to you soon.