Ranie Stevenson is trying to put the puzzle together of her family history, but she’s missing one piece.
“We have a mystery in our family with my great-great-great grandfather. He came from Ireland at 18, 19-years-old, approximately, and we’ve never been able to find out where he’s from,” Stevenson said on Sunday.
For the past few months, Stevenson has been digging into her genealogy to find the answer.
To help on the pursuit of the past, she attended the Saskatchewan Genealogical Society conference at the Park Town Hotel in Saskatoon.
“The thing with genealogy is it’s a never-ending thing. When people stop, they just stop because they’re done. Things are always changing, records becoming available and new things are discovered,” said Tammy Vallee, a member of the conference’s planning committee.
The three-day conference brought together 150 people from across Western Canada.
The weekend featured 25 different sessions, with many focused on technology topics such as Facebook genealogy and Microsoft Excel.
“Fifteen years ago you would have gone to a library and looked at microfilm, but technology has changed how we do genealogy. More information goes online, more information is digitized. We have to learn how to adapt to that and how to find these resources,” Vallee said.
Stevenson hopes to soon solve where specifically in Ireland her great-great-great grandfather lived, because she has a trip booked there in June.
“We got to really hurry up and find out where he came from,” Stevenson said with a laugh.
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