We Traced Our Family Tree and Ended Up in the Most Unexpected Place

We thought we were just clicking through records. Then we found a town that felt like home.

It started with a shared curiosity and a free evening. My sister and I had talked about exploring our family roots for years, but like most things, it kept getting pushed aside. One night, with nothing else on the calendar, we finally sat down to see what we could find, expecting little more than vague references and familiar names.

But then we stumbled on something that made us stop.

A small town in central Italy: Assisi.

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Neither of us had heard the name passed down in stories, but there it was, our great-great-grandfather, Matteo, listed in a passenger manifest from 1901, born in Assisi, Umbria. A stonemason, just 20 years old when he boarded a ship to America.

We were fascinated. And completely unsure what to do next.

We weren’t ready to fly across the ocean on a hunch. But we also didn’t want to let this discovery slip away. That’s when a friend told us about Discover.Live and their Ancestry Discovery Tours, live, interactive virtual tours led by local guides in ancestral towns around the world.

So we booked one for Assisi.

We weren’t sure what to expect. A slideshow? A basic walk-and-talk? What we got was something very different.

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Our guide, Paolo, met us over ZOOM from a quiet square in Assisi, where the stones shimmered pink in the morning sun. He introduced himself, asked us about our family name, and then walked with us, literally, through the streets our ancestors may have walked.

He showed us the old churches, the hillside homes, the winding alleys where stonemasons once gathered. He pointed out small, beautiful details we never would have noticed on our own. It wasn’t just a tour. It was a conversation. A connection.

For an hour, we weren’t sitting at home in front of a screen. We were there.

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We didn’t find a long-lost cousin or uncover a secret fortune. But we did find something even more valuable: a sense of belonging to a place we’d never been. It gave us new context for our family’s journey, and a quiet sense of pride we hadn’t expected.

We’ve since taken two more tours with Discover Live and plan to do more. Each time, we get a little closer to understanding where we came from and how that shapes who we are now.

To anyone wanting to know more about their heritage, Discover.Live’s Ancestry Discovery Tours make it easy to explore your roots from wherever you are. Their tours are led by local guides, bringing history, culture, and personal heritage to life in real time.

You don’t need a plane ticket to go home. Sometimes, a live guide, a quiet street, and a good Wi-Fi connection are all it takes!