Previously, org-element-at-point had an optional keep-trail variable that
was supposed to show the siblings, parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, etc.

This feature no longer seems to be present.

What would the process be now to obtain the parents of a given element?

This would be useful for walking back up the tree to obtain a sparse-tree
structure for archiving (see:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2014-10/msg00228.html)

Regards,
Jonathan