This presentation will be a novice researcher’s travel diary with fun, interesting and informative notes for beginner to advanced researchers who would like to learn about their Ancestral Trails through visiting the places their families have lived and through searching original documents to develop reliable and accurate family tree lines.

Brenda’s travel to Newfoundland this summer to research her mother’s family history after finding gaps and hitting brick walls in her past 4 years of tracing her family lines surprised her with many twists and turns on her trail. She describes her two weeks in Newfoundland as a “novel that wrote itself with an ending that changed everyday.” The topics of interest Brenda will present from her travels will be how DNA and Genetic Genealogy together can inform family research, local sources for information that cannot be found online, original sources for records in NFLD, issues in immigration searches and fun travel notes for visiting NFLD.

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Brenda was raised in Ontario and moved to Manitoba then BC when she began her teaching career. Now, as a retired teacher, living in Surrey, BC, she is known for her passion for Canadian, local and family history, her volunteer work at a local historical site, her role on health advisories and in health research activities, the workshops she volunteers to lead on writing and craft skills and her travels she loves to share with others.

About 4 years ago, Brenda inherited a large box of notes and family research information from her father which inspired her to search for family lines that had not been traced. She attended several conferences and webinars and visited places for original information sources in national and provincial archives as well as local historical sites. She is a member of Ontario Genealogical Society, Family History Society of Newfoundland and BC Genealogy Society.