Many people use Home Exchange to visit family. Christine did an exchange to Canada to meet her relatives!
In Christine’s words:
I’ve been an amateur genealogist for over 10 years and had hit a brick wall in the search for my Grandfathers sister, Emmeline. All I knew was that she had emigrated to Canada in 1914 with her husband and 3 children. Her eldest child had become a Mountie, but all contact with the family was lost when Emmeline died in 1963.We had done a few home exchanges, but in the summer of 2010 decided that we would like to visit Canada. We waited to see where would be offered. This is often the best way as we have ended up in places we never would have visited. We eventually accepted an offer for Kitsilano area of Vancouver. A few weeks later, I had a breakthrough in my family research. A lady had offered to look up an obituary for me and one of the names was unusual. I looked it up on Google and found she worked at Toronto University. I emailed the university and Kathleen was thrilled to hear from me but also passed on my letter to her sister Maryann who lived in Vancouver!
This led me to meeting, and getting to know my Canadian family. The day after arriving in Vancouver, Maryann and her family came to meet me. I could not believe how much she looked like my grandfather’s eldest daughter. From the first meeting we ‘clicked’. We have the same sense of family importance. They invited us to their Whistler chalet overnight and we saw them again later on in our holiday when we went to their home and met their extended family.We had an amazing time in Vancouver. My son did a bungee jump and a tandem sky dive, but the highlight of our trip was meeting my ‘new cousins’. Since then we have kept in regular contact. We speak frequently and ‘chat’ on social media sites. In June 2013 Maryann’s youngest daughter Julia and her boyfriend visited, we had an amazing week showing them the sites of East Anglia. Julia is a big Harry Potter fan, so we ended up having an exciting visit to the studios in London, too.
In August 2013 we accepted a Home Exchange to Vancouver Island, Maryann and her husband Gregg came across from the mainland and stayed 3 days with us. It was wonderful to see them again.Next year we are not swapping but taking a train coast to coast across Canada, we start in Vancouver, so plan to meet up with our extended Canadian family for a meal. Later on in the journey one of the stops is in Toronto where I plan to finally meet Kathleen. Without Homeexchange I would never have this bond with my Canadian family and I would probably never have met them. So thank you for the service you provide. Where will we end up in 2017? Who knows, the worlds a big place. But there’s plenty of exciting Home Exchange opportunities out there.
