Welcome!

Hey – hi! Thanks for stopping by! This is the beginning of our genealogy journey together.

But first, let me introduce myself. My name is Louise Genetti Roach and I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My background is in photography and fine art. Over the years I’ve had a varied career with my last position being the Marketing Manager for an industrial manufacturing company. Today I’m retired, enjoy mountain hiking and traveling to interesting places.

How did I end up writing a genealogy blog? Well, five years ago I was bitten by the ancestry bug after watching the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are”. I started down the path of research and never turned back. At the time I knew almost nothing about my family. Then I began digging. What unfolded was a truly American story of an enigmatic family with a very long history that once lived in an ancient land. Sounds like a once-upon-a-time fairy tale, doesn’t it?

After five years of searching archives, meeting cousins and collecting data, I knew I had to share my findings with you – The Genetti Family. Since I have so much to tell you, this blog format will allow me to write a little at a time as I delve into our history. Plus it gives you the opportunity to ask questions and become a part of the process through the comments section of each blog post.

My father was a second generation American of 100% Tyrolean ancestry. That means that half of my DNA originated in a tiny valley in the Austrian Tyrol (now part of Italy). This fact alone blows my mind! For hundreds of years my ancestors knew each other’s families (Genetti, Marchetti, Zambotti, Fellin, Cologna, Lorenzetti, etc.). They intermarried and never moved away from their Alpine home. Even when their country was taken over by different rulers and governments, the people and their culture remained unchanged. Then came the great migration at the end of the 19th century when entire families left the Val di Non for a better life in North or South America. And yet today you can still find Tyrolean homes in Trentino, Italy built in the fifteenth century that are inhabited and well kept; coat-of-arms and frescoes that grace plaster walls; and cobblestone roads once traveled by Roman soldiers still wind their way up to mountain passes.

So begins the journey to unravel our family’s past and understand the almost-mythical land of Tyrol. I have stories to share, pages of history to turn and the lives of ancestors to recount.

While you’re waiting for each new blog post to be published, take a stroll through the website. Explore the ever-growing family tree, send me your photos and stories, and become a part of The Genetti Family Genealogy Project.

Let’s begin … or as they say in Italian “Cominciamo!”