Treffen Tuesday

March – Brenda Smith, “An Uneasy Neighbor: Parsing a prison record to discover ‘Trapper Frank Weber’”

Presentation:

Franz “Shorty” Weber was a Polish German immigrant to the USA in 1902. By 1913 he had followed railway building to northern British Columbia where he tried farming before finding his solitary future as a fur trapper. Starting from Shorty’s 1940 prison admission form, Brenda L. Smith has discovered his journey across North America to his life on the trap line on the northeastern slopes of the Rockie Mountains.

Biography:

Brenda L. Smith is a Canadian historian and consultant with comprehensive in journalism, cultural trusteeship, and community development. She presents programs that teach family history research methodology. Brenda’s interest in historical research stems, in part, from her German grandparents’ origins in the Volga, and accounts of survival crossing North America, and achieving a new home in northeast British Cumbia. This spring Brenda will co-present Unlock Your Family Story: Writing and Publishing zyou Family History for Island Mountain Arts in Wells, BC.