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Genealogical Society organizing their biggest conference to date

The event in Smithers will feature workshops and speakers from across the country.
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The Bulkley Valley Genealogical Society (BVGS) is hosting one of their biggest events ever this spring.

The conference is called ‘Connecting your Heirlines’ and will run the first weekend in May at the Senior’s Activity Centre on Mountainview Drive in Smithers.

Society member Joan Warmerdam said the group has been together for over 23 years trying to help people discover their backgrounds, but this conference will be their biggest seminar at a cost of around $8,000.

“We are dedicated to assisting people to chase their family history, to find their family roots,” she said. “We have had seminars in the past and brought in visiting speakers. We’ve never done one in this magnitude. This is the biggest, most expensive, most ambitious one.”

BVGS is bringing in three different speakers from across the country to give speeches and offer workshops.

The first speaker will be Paul Jones from Toronto, who will talk about finding lost cousins and DNA testing for the non-expert. Warmerdam said he will also touch on discovering information about old photographs.

“He is also giving a lecture on how to get everything out of a family photo. A lot of people inherit photos from their grandparents but no one has written the names on it. Dr. Jones can tell you how to figure out who is in it,” she said.

Xenia Stanford is a professional genealogist and award winning editor and writer. She will speak on searching popular internet sites such as ancestry.com and FamilySearch to help find old family records.

Stanford will also make a presentation called ‘Use Ten Steps to Smash Through Brick Walls in Eastern European Genealogy.’ She will give a guide that can assist people in tracing their Eastern European ancestors.

The third speaker will be Jamie Brown who will discuss money saving tips, savvy strategies and inexpensive resources to help with research.

The conference will run on Saturday and Sunday but there is a pre-conference event on Friday evening that includes a workshop on writing family history.

The event is limited to 90 people and almost of a third of the tickets have already been sold. Early bird pricing ends on March 21. There is also a block of rooms reserved at the Sunshine Inn for out of town guests.

For more information email the society at bvgs2@hotmail.com.



Marisca Bakker

About the Author: Marisca Bakker

Marisca was born and raised in Ontario and moved to Smithers almost ten years ago on a one-year contract.
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