As summer yields vacation, festival, and tourism opportunities in Arkansas, and state government is being reorganized, Arkansas has an enhanced opportunity to expand on custom roots tourism. It is both highly satisfying to tourists and lucrative for the state.
The 200th anniversary year of the Arkansas Territory is a fitting time to highlight our history, open our hearts, and call our children home.
Didn't the Arkansas Traveler of lore seek adventure, enjoyment, and learning? At the recent Juneteenth celebration in Little Rock, among the participants were family reunion members who were both connecting with their personal families and to the very heritage that surrounds African Americans in a historic civil rights city.
Genealogy tourism involves seeing family locations, research in archives, historical societies, and libraries, and visiting heritage tourism sites and events for context and connection. Arkansas is well-positioned to provide those, and tourism is up.
The reorganization of state government, combining the assets and energy of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism and the Department of Arkansas Heritage, buttresses the goals of genealogy tourism. Now is the time to add the roots-tourism marketing that keeps travelers in the state longer.
Tourists bring DNA and dollars
Arkansas served 30 million-plus tourists in 2018. All those travelers brought DNA with them, with each tourist having more than 128 fifth great-grandparents. Tourists with Arkansas roots, hungering for a deeper sense of identity in learning about their heritage, can engage in genealogy travel and research 365 days a year in all areas of the state.
The Natural State must do three things: attract new travelers (including those at family reunions), extend the stays of business/convention travelers with Arkansas heritage, and encourage Arkansans to learn about their own heritage that occurred in other parts of the state. Also, we must promote genealogy to a logical tourism base--our retirees.
This all comes as no surprise to the Friends of Arkansas State Archives or the Arkansas Genealogical Society. The Archives saw 48 percent of its new researchers be tourists from outside the state from 2015-2017. Likewise, the genealogical society hosted many out-of-staters at its annual convention in 2018 where both genealogy travel and a nationally known speaker on DNA research, CeCe Moore, were featured.
Enhancing the roots-tourism heartbeat
State Tourism Director Jim Dailey often speaks of a sense of place and of each community promoting its story. Its story is rooted in the heritage tourism sites and facilities in which the state and local communities have already invested.
Director Stacy Hurst, soon to assume duties as secretary of combined government units, likewise has Department of Arkansas Heritage ads that encourage family history travel. This is all to the good at the same time that DNA testing has exploded. More than 25 million have tested, and they have siblings, spouses, and cousins. Have DNA test ... will travel.
You'll suddenly be inspired to travel to research facilities like the Arkansas State Archives, then to heritage tourism sites including historic parks that provide context for family places and reunions. Roots travel and research discovery is deeply personal and transformational, as anyone who has undertaken it seriously will affirm.
It is also lucrative. Statistics on heritage tourists show that they stay up to 30 percent longer and spend more money than others do. As tourists with Arkansas heritage are returning to explore family origins, they can contribute to the state's economy and its quality of life. That is a heartwarming win-win proposition.
All parts of the state can promote and benefit from genealogy travel and research. Central Arkansas--featuring diverse Native American, African American, and other immigrant history and museums, plus the Arkansas State Archives, the Butler Center, the Mosaic Templars and other research facilities--is made to order for genealogy travel and national genealogy conferences.
The 15-county Arkansas Delta Byways area, in which Arkansas State University, under the direction of the retiring Dr. Ruth Hawkins, has developed numerous heritage tourism sites, is another area that is ready to go.
El Dorado, Fort Smith, Northwest Arkansas and other communities have equally critical history and cultural offerings.
We have Civil War, agricultural, and frontier history. We have suffrage and presidential history. We have immigrant history. We have foodways and historic state parks history. Each community can add roots travel to its heritage tourism promotion with minimal additional cost.
The state must command an opportunity to attract tourists and further promote its growing assets. Those fifth great-grandparents' history, and cousins not yet embraced, sentimentally beckon outsiders. Arkansas is a Natural State for genealogy travel in 2019 and beyond.
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Jeanne Rollberg is a genealogist with American Dream Genealogy and Research who serves on the boards of the Friends of the Arkansas State Archives and the Arkansas Genealogical Society. Email her at [email protected].
Editorial on 06/22/2019