Cynthia Seitz is the mother of four children. Joshua, Gabrielle, Rachel and Caleb, they’re grown up now, between the ages 20 to 30. She took a leap of faith after much prayer to start a new business that would fulfill her lifelong interests and a mother’s specific prayers to have a job she could work from home. She was recently seen as one of the vendors at the Spanish Festival, also a celebrant as a descendant of the Canary Islanders that settled in Louisiana. Her story is encouragement for all mothers with a desire to spend more time with their children working from home.

Why did you become a travel agent?

My story started before they were all gone. I was a school teacher. I taught French for one year until they got rid of it for PE. Then I taught 4th grade until I started working in the hospitality industry. My husband and I bought a timeshare for our 20th anniversary. You can book your stuff with points and can buy more points for different things. So we started renting our place out to take care of our maintenance fees. We got so busy, we bought more points and it began to snowball. After six or seven months, there was so much business I didn’t go back to teaching. I was working from home.

Do you work with someone else?

The travel business started with me, but then my husband got laid off from the oil industry and he works with me now. I do the people things and he handles the bookkeeping, spreadsheets and taxes. We’ve been doing it together for five years. We started with the timeshare rentals in 2012 and the travel agency is just the last two years.

When is your first heritage trip?

We leave for France May 15. There are about 30 on the tour. I’ve always wanted to go to France and specifically the towns where my ancestors lived. So I started looking online and came across Claude Boudreaux. I found him online by chance, but he and Jose Manuel De Molina Bautista, the tour guide for the trip to Spain, are both Living Legends in the Acadian Museum. Claude is from New Brunswick and has been taking people to the places of the Cajuns for eight years. We’re working together now. This first trip is to France but in August we’re going for the Acadian World Congress. First we’re going to tour Nova Scotia where the Acadians first lived.

How did you get to the place of organizing the trip to Spain?

The heritage trips just started this year. I was looking at Facebook and a woman was looking for an agent and with our timeshare success, I looked into the travel agency business. With all the education you do to become a travel agent, they suggest you pick a niche. At first I thought I’d do Disney tours but everybody does those. Then it hit me, since I was 14 or 15 I’ve loved to do genealogy. So I thought, ‘We can do heritage tours,’ because that is my passion! We haven’t done that much traveling with the children but now I have time and have gotten back into my family genealogy. God really opened up the door for me. I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was with Jose and Claude right off the bat. I told Jose I wanted this to be a warm and friendly, visit with some of the original family members, but he said most of them no longer live there. I’m still hoping to sit on someone’s porch and sing Spanish songs or something like that. I’m hoping we fill up, but word is just getting out. The trip is still open and we can take reservations until it sells out.

If someone was from Germany, would you look into that or other places for heritage tours?

Yes we would. There is a group I’ve talked to called Creole-Acadians whose genealogy goes back to the Congo or Nigeria. It doesn’t have to be a group. If an individual family was interested, I can look into that and design a trip for them anywhere. Through Facebook now, you can find genealogists in different places that will help you. Often they will greet you and take you to meet cousins or what have you in the cities where we travel. Ancestory.com also is able to assist us.

Are your children interested in genealogy?

No, younger people haven’t slowed down enough to care about their heritage yet, but my youngest is interested in learning French. I didn’t start until college but thought, ‘I’m Cajun, I want to learn French.’ I got invited to a French group in Lafayette to talk about my tours and they let me speak in English about the tours, but I had to answer their questions in French. My French is rusty. I’m Cajun and Canary Islands, the French and the Spanish heritage. Whoever came on the ships from the Canary Islands fought in the Revolutionary War. I have the records of an ancestor fighting with Galvez. When my children were younger, we were going to a church that had a school and then we stopped. I home schooled my kids for four years. But they liked sports. When you homeschool, children can’t play high school sports. My two youngest played and got scholarships for college assistance. Our lives evolved through the years. Now my oldest is a computer programmer and my oldest daughter works with social media at a company near Atlanta. My third daughter is a teacher and coach and my youngest is working in Colorado.

Are you happy that you’ve done this?

Yes, I’m very happy that I’ve done this. I had prayed that God would give me something so I could work from home. I always wanted to travel, but raising kids, especially when they were younger, it’s expensive to take them all. But He has opened up the doors for me to do this and to go to the places where my ancestors lived. We’re going to go to the Canary Islands, too. The St. Bernard Parish historian also is from the Canary Islands and he’s helping put that trip together. Then we want to go where the New Orleans coast German population came from. We still have about 16 places for the Spainish trip, four for the August one. I can answer any questions or anyone interested can visit my website,

SeitzTravel.com, or call (985) 991-6178. Even my hometown is one of the Spanish names that settled New Iberia — Gary. It’s near Houma. We really like New Iberia.