For families planning a trip to where they came from

Heritage trip research

The places your family actually came from — researched, cited, mapped

Before you book the flight, know which parish, which townland, which street. We trace one line back to the place of origin using records we can show you, then assemble the places worth standing in: the church, the cemetery, the archive that holds the register, the harbour they sailed from. Scots-Irish, Irish, French, German, Italian and every other line the public archives can reach.

What you would tell us

The ancestor you want to follow home (a name, a rough date, a place in the US)
Where you think they came from, if you know

What you would receive

The sourced line from you to the emigrant, with each record cited
A list of the places tied to that line, with what each archive holds and how to visit
An honest note of where the trail ends and what might extend it

Which public archives this draws on today

Chronicling America (Library of Congress) — Historic US newspapers 1690s–1963 with OCR text: obituaries, notices, local news
National Archives Catalog (NARA) — Passenger lists, naturalizations, military service and pension files, homestead/land files, census images, federal records
Open Archives (207 archives: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Suriname + US indexes) — Civil registration (birth, marriage, death), church books, population registers, notarial and tax rolls, militia — 207 archives
Wikidata (notable people & places) — Structured facts on notable people (birth/death, places, relations) and every gazetteer place; CC0
USGS GNIS place names (incl. historical) — Every named US place, current and historical, with state, county and coordinates
Reclaim The Records (US vital indexes, via Open Archives) — Birth, marriage and death INDEXES released under FOIA: New York State & NYC, New Jersey, Missouri, Nebraska, Mississippi, Maryland, Connecticut; BIRLS veteran deaths
Riksarkivet (Sweden) — registers & archives — Indexed birth, marriage and death register entries (parish, date, parents), plus archive volumes and AI-transcribed text
DigitalNZ / Papers Past (New Zealand) — Papers Past newspapers 1839–1980s (full text), plus NZ library, museum and archive collections
Queensland State Archives indexes (Australia) — Immigration and passenger indexes, naturalisations, wills, inquests, hospital deaths, gaol registers, orphanages, Boer War — 12 of 128 CC BY indexes searched live

9 live archives hold the record types this service rests on. Archives whose terms forbid automated access are never searched by machine; where one of them holds the answer, the report says exactly where to look.

Interested?

No spam, no card. One email when it opens, and you can say what you need in reply.

Or search the archives yourself, free, right now.

Provara's rule for every service: a fact is shown with the record it came from, or it is marked as unsourced. Nothing on this page states a fact about any person or place; it describes what would be researched and from which public archives.