The Trump Administration Is About To Make Tracing Your Roots A Lot More Expensive – Forbes

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Have you dreamed of researching your family tree before taking a trip to the old sod? You’d best get a move on. The Trump administration wants to make it much more expensive to track down certain official immigration documents.

The Department of Homeland Security has proposed jacking up fees to access geneaological records from much of the 18oos and 1900s. In some cases, fees would triple; in others, they would rise nearly 500 percent, from $130 to $625 to obtain a single paper file, as reported in The Washington Post.

These key records — citizenship and alien registration files, naturalization records, visa applications and other documents — are accessible through the Genealogy Program, which is administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The program is a powerful tool for professional geneaologists and hobbyists tracking the lives of immigrants who arrived in the United States between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, one of our nation’s peak immigration periods.

“USCIS is required to examine incoming and outgoing expenditures, just like a business, and make adjustments based on that analysis. This proposed adjustment in fees would ensure more applicants cover the true cost of their applications and minimizes subsidies from an already over-extended system,” said Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of USCIS, said in a statement. No date has been set for the new fees to go into effect.

A forest of tools to trace a family tree

Geneaology tourism — sometimes called “family tree travel” or “ancestry travel” — has boomed over the last few years, piggybacking on the rise of sites like Ancestry and FamilySearch, which help millions of members research their family histories. It can take months or years of research to properly your trace roots and prepare for a visit to your ancestral homeland, but DNA testing kits like 23andMe, AncestryDNA and African Ancestry can help fast-forward the process by zeroing in on a country or territory.

Early this year, an MIT Technology Review report estimated that more than 26 million people have turned to DNA-testing companies to get their genomes analyzed. “If the pace continues, the gene troves could hold data on the genetic makeup of more than 100 million people within 24 months,” the article projected. Once customers receive their results, many plan a bucket-list trip to a country they may not have previously visited.

The travel industry has embraced the DNA travel trend with gusto. Late last spring, Airbnb partnered with 23andMe to offer trip-planning guides for heritage travel. EF Go Ahead Tours has teamed up with Ancestry.com to offer heritage tours. Each trip, which includes an AncestryDNA kit and pre-trip family history review, is accompanied by a geneaologist.

In addition, a few European destinations now bend over backward to help travelers track down their ancestral homes. Tourism Ireland, for example, has an entire section of its website dedicated to helping U.S. tourists with Irish roots figure out whether their forefathers hailed from the streets of Dublin or the wilds of Connemara. VisitScotland has a step-by-step guide to uncovering your Scottish connections.

Still, it makes perfect sense to begin geneaology research with U.S. immigration records. Many do-it-yourselfers find a wonky satisfaction in discovering the public records of immigrant ancestors through the USCIS database.

If you’ve always thought it might be fun to embark on such an endeavor, do it soon, before the price hikes kick in.

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