The travelers I want to mention are pioneers, who were primarily agricultural people, who moved long distances on the hope of better opportunities as the country moved west. The surname is also West, and they were from a part of Washington Co., New York that is on the border of Vermont, USA.
I have a volume that came down in the family written by a girl named Narcissus West, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/West-18805 who was the genealogist of her generation. In it she documented vital records of her siblings, and with it I have been able to document them beyond the small farming town in which she lived.
It was her brother Levi Wheaton West https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/West-6056 who was the traveler. With my info from Narcissus, I located him in the censuses, 1850 Ripley, Chautauqua NY, 1860 - 1880 to Monroe County, Wisconsin. After him, I could easily trace his son Ansyl to LaClede Co Missouri.
At one point I was looking for a male West to test our line's yDNA, and called the presumed relatives in Missouri. I talked with a lovely lady, who listened with interest and all but said "You mean we're yankees?" The dna did not get tested, but I could prove the paper trail was right. So I put the corrected information on Findagrave.
More recently I found a profile on wikitree that was from one of my found West cousins. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/West-6056 I was able to reach out to that distant cousin to give her back her yankee roots. All because of a girl Narcissus, who never traveled, but remembered her brother who did and with whom she lost touch. She wrote about him, so some distant relative would eventually find it and preserve the line for (we hope) posterity.
Many families lost touch with their relatives who were pioneers going west, or in this case, west and then south. Genealogy, and dna can bring us all back together.