This Paris vacation photography session helped one mom pass her grandparents’ love of travel on to her own children.
There are so many reasons people travel all around the world to new destinations. Some do it for the pure love of travel, some travel for adventure, and some, like this family, travel to connect more closely to their family history. Before landing in Paris, Chelsey and her family headed to Scotland to fill in more of their family tree. And in Paris? Read on for more on how Chelsey and her family carried out her grandparents’ legacy in one of their favourite cities in the world.
“My father and I share a deep love for family history work. My great grandparents immigrated from Scotland just before my grandfather was born. We’ve continuously hit brick walls when trying to find names to further develop our family tree. For years we’ve been saying that if we could just go to Scotland and look through their records, we’d be able to find more names. My father turns 60 this year. So, as a birthday gift, I bought him a plane ticket to go to Scotland with us. We found a couple of family history experts while we were there. We learned so much about our MacGregor clan, our ancestors, and were able to find so many new names to learn about. The entirety of that search, walking where my family once walked, and sharing that with my dad and children was my favorite part of our trip.
“My grandparents had a great love for travel. They have inspired my lifelong wanderlust. When they passed away, I was helping to clean their home and came across their passport books covered in stamps and visas from everywhere you can imagine. Their home was filled with artwork from various stays in other countries. Before she passed, my grandmother made a small investment in each of her grandchildren’s names, so when dividend checks would come, I would tuck them away and save the money until we had enough to take our three children on a trip through the UK and Europe. We started in Scotland, then headed to England and France, and finally Ireland. Our kids are fantastic travelers — my grandparents’ legacy of travel has definitely been instilled in them. We knew we wanted family pictures somewhere along our way. When we were trying to decide, I found paintings from Paris that I had kept from my grandfather’s office and remembered them telling me how much they loved Paris.” — Chelsey
