Grandma’s Trip to New York

Some time ago I received a Xerox copy of a diary, the memoirs of “Mom’s Trip to New York.”  I don’t have any details about the trip.  Based on the content of the diary this was post World War Two.  It contains some interesting information.  I will let you draw your own conclusions, but the personality of Ruth Harmon Brubaker comes through in this diary.  Over time, I hope to provide more and more of the transcripts of  this trip.  And I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

Left home wed. nite at 9:30—Some send off too—it was swell.  Went right to sleep and had a nice restful day.  Will get into Laramie at 4:30—We have swell friends, haven’t we?  & swell family.  Thurs. –8 o’clock: Dad got on the train and its sort of nice to have him—he’s going clear to Omaha.  He managed to get a double berth and we had a nice supper in the diner—we are sure traveling fast—will cross the whole state of Nebr. in the nite.  Get into Omaha at 6 o’clock tomorrow morning. 

Well, here I am on the train for Chicago—this is a swell coach—You can ride anything here abouts on a pass—never had a bit of trouble—I’ll get into Chicago at 11:30 8.  This train really travels--& pretty smooth too.  I’ll eat my lunch and eat a meal in the diner tonight.  I sort of crave coffee—our breakfast cost $1.25 per—our dinner last nite $1.65 per.

We are going thru a town named Missouri Valley that just had a real flood—I see chicken houses & sheds flipped over & great fields of corn about 8 inches high—just drowned—I hope the road bed is o.k.

Genealogical Tourism Gains in Demand

Genealogical Tourism, the vacation designed to explore and find new details about our ancestors and their lives, has become one of the fastest growing markets of vacation travel. This information is coming from a recent study by Professor Carla Santos and graduate student Grace Yan published in the Journal of Travel Research. Santos explained this growth is happening because “genealogical tourism provides an irreplaceable dimension of material reality.” In other words, nothing can quite replace the emotional euphoria we feel when we visit our Great-Grandfather’s original homestead, or when we step off of the train in the same depot as our grandmother as she migrated from Boston to Nebraska.

Santos and Yan go on to explain that the sense of authenticity provides us with a feeling not felt in most vacations. Visiting a variety of tourist attractions gives us a feeling of false fabrication. In my early career we had the term “farby” to describe this misleading, and clearly fabricated sense of entertainment over authenticity.

In addition, Santos and Yan suggest that transportation that has given recent generations the ability to move across country has diminished our sense of “home.” We are apparently “longing for an authentic connection” to our roots.

The article is an interesting bit of information if you can get beyond the excessive vocabulary of the authors. In spite of the overly expansive wording of the authors, this article points to an exciting, expanding interest in Genealogy and Family History research; an increase that is very encouraging.

And thanks go out to Dick Eastman and the Eastman On-line Newsletter for bringing this article to my attention.