Professional genealogist Tedesco (CAS\u201906), a host on the show since 2015, has traced her own line back hundreds of years\u2014though she hasn\u2019t found any pirates or royals yet. Her father\u2019s family tree winds back to Italy in the 1600s, her mother\u2019s through the American Revolution to Northern Europe in the 1500s. Just over a decade ago, she wouldn\u2019t have been able to tell you much about her ancestry beyond her immediate family. Then, in 2006, Tedesco and her Italian-born grandmother started digging into the past.<\/p>\n
A math major at CAS, Tedesco was working as a financial analyst when a colleague mentioned his new hobby: genealogy. She loved hearing about his every new discovery and decided to give it a shot herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started writing to Italy, my grandmother and myself, to get Italian records\u2014birth, marriage, and death records, for example\u2014and then we reached the beginning of civil registration offices in Italy, which is in the early 1800s for the ones we were writing to.\u201d<\/p>\n She asked Italian officials what she\u2019d have to do to go deeper. \u201cThey said, \u2018Well, you have to come over here and research the church records.\u2019 And then I did.\u201d She flew to San Pietro a Maida, her grandfather\u2019s hometown, in Calabria, Italy.<\/p>\n After making that first physical connection to her distant relatives, Tedesco was hooked. In 2011, she signed up for the BU genealogical research certificate program<\/a>, a course that teaches topics like evidence evaluation and ethical forensic work, which is often done to support legal cases. She started with the goal of advancing her own research, but \u201cwent from needing and wanting more education,\u201d she says, \u201cto realizing that this was something I could pursue as a career.\u201d She began taking clients, helping them find their own Italian roots.<\/p>\n In 2013, Tedesco launched ORIGINS ITALY<\/a>. What she describes as a \u201cbespoke Italian genealogical research firm\u201d helps clients find single ancestors or draw entire family trees; some customers just want help with the documentation needed for dual citizenship. Genealogy has become a big business, illustrated by the bevy of TV shows and professional services catering to family historians: Ancestry.com<\/a> claims to handle 75 million searches a day and have 90 million family trees in its database; companies like AncestryDNA<\/a> and 23andMe<\/a> can uncover your ethnic heritage in exchange for $99 and a saliva sample. Tedesco flies to Italy at least once a year for extended trips delving into local archives. Then, she shares the stories she\u2019s discovered. \u201cA lot of clients love what they\u2019ve seen on the Genealogy Roadshow<\/em> television program and want almost a similar kind of presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n Tedesco joined the show before its second season after its cohosts\u2014she\u2019d met Josh Taylor and Kenyatta Berry at genealogy conferences\u2014recommended her for the job; she auditioned and got the part.<\/p>\n When she tells the story of a family\u2019s past on TV, Tedesco typically begins with a single historical document, zooming in on a key relative, then charting their story through document after document to build a rich tale of their life, as well as the world they lived in; the tour continues through that ancestor\u2019s parents, then their parents.<\/p>\n \u201cFolks don\u2019t necessarily want to look at a chart with names and dates. They want to hear a story,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what really gets people hooked.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Mary](\"\/cas\/files\/2017\/10\/tedesco.jpg\")