Genealogy Tourism is a segment of the tourism

Tourism

Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes".Tourism has become a...

 market consisting of tourists who have ancestral connections to their holiday destination. These genealogy

Genealogy

Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...

 tourists travel to the land of their ancestors to reconnect with their past and "walk in the footsteps of their forefathers".

Genealogy tourism is a worldwide industry, although it is more prominent in countries that have experienced mass emigration at some time in history and thus have a large worldwide Diaspora

Diaspora

A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...

 community. For example, genealogy tourism has been prominent in Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 for some time. Recorded genealogy tourism peaked in the year 2000 as 116,000 genealogical visitors traveled to the island. The Irish Tourist Board

Fáilte Ireland

Fáilte Ireland is the National Tourism Development Authority of the Republic of Ireland. This authority was established under the National Tourism Development Authority Act of 2003 and replaces and builds upon the functions of Bord Fáilte, its predecessor organization...

 ceased recording genealogy visitors numbers from 2004, and its present levels are now unknown.

Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

staged a homecoming festival in 2009 to appeal to genealogy tourists.