Antenati
Genealogy
About
Antenati Genealogy
Family history, carefully done
Antenati Genealogy is a research practice. Not a database subscription, not an algorithm's guess at a family tree, a person who goes to the records, reads them, and tells you what they actually say.
The work is documentary. Birth, marriage and death registers. Census returns and parish books. Ship manifests, naturalization files, military records, land and probate papers. Whatever survives, wherever it survives; I research family history worldwide, and I am not limited to any one country or region.
What comes back to you is a written, sourced account of your family that someone else could pick up in fifty years and follow.
Why I do this
My father's father was from Montreal. He was killed in the Second World War when my father was a baby, and my father grew up knowing nothing about him, his family, or the circumstances of his death. On my mother's side, my Sicilian grandmother died when I was seven, and a great deal went with her: the traditions, the recipes, the stories nobody had thought to write down. My mother's own grandmother had died young, years before my mother was born, and that branch was very nearly a blank.
The research I did led to me finding first cousins my father never knew he had. I reconstructed his father's family and established how and where he died at war; an answer my father had waited his whole life for. On my paternal grandmother's side I pieced together a family shaped by a series of tragic losses, and in doing so began to understand why the people in it had become who they were.
Then I traced my grandmother's family in Borgetto, Sicily. I had always loved Italy. but getting off the plane in Sicily was something else entirely, people looked like me, they had hair like mine, and walking the streets of my ancestral town was a full-circle moment. It filled me with gratitude for the sacrifices those people made so that I could live better than they did.
I went back to Sicily and visited my great-grandmother's town, Cesarò. I met fifth cousins there who rolled out the red carpet for me. I return every year and I am closer to them now than I am to my first cousins, and through them, and through that town, I feel I have finally come to know a great-grandmother I never met.
My interest in genetic genealogy began with a DNA surprise in my own family. That is what led me to volunteer as a forensic genealogist, helping other people find their biological families.
The name "Antenati" is simply the Italian word for ancestors, a nod to the Sicilian side that started all of it.
That story is Sicilian. This practice is not. It is precisely because I know what it is to sit on your side of this, waiting on an answer about my own family, that I take the work on for anyone looking for theirs, in any country, from whatever records survive.
I'm also a certified travel advisor and co-owner of Wanderlust Travel Consultants, LLC, a travel company I co-founded in Moorestown, New Jersey. As an independent advisor, I design custom itineraries and have partnership access to hotels and resorts worldwide.
Through Wander Roots, Wanderlust's ancestral travel brand, I build trips around exactly the places this research uncovers: the town, the church, the street, the address where a family lived before they left. I do it because I've been on that trip myself, and I know what happens when you stand in the street your family walked out of a century ago. It's one of the few kinds of travel where the itinerary can't be written until the research is done. Research is contracted with Antenati Enterprises LLC. Travel is contracted separately with Wanderlust Travel Consultants, LLC, under its own agreement, a deliberate separation of the two business, and yet they work hand in hand with one another.
About
Marissa Clark
Marissa Clark is a genealogist and family historian with more than 20 years of experience conducting in-depth documentary research. Educated through the Genealogical Studies Certificate Program at the University of Strathclyde, she specializes in reconstructing complex family lines, and transforming archival records into clear, well-documented family histories.
As a volunteer genetic genealogist, Marissa has assisted individuals in identifying biological families, applying ethical standards, analytical rigor, and compassionate interpretation to sensitive cases.
Her work emphasizes accuracy, proper sourcing, and narrative clarity, ensuring that each client receives research that is not only credible and defensible, but meaningful. With a strong foundation in visual storytelling, she presents genealogical findings in polished, accessible formats that preserve both historical integrity and human context.