I discover Ancestry.ca. I join for three months and spend a couple of hours a day searching its database. I find my grandparents’ birth, marriage and death certificates. Each new document leads me down another path. I keep a folder for each person and file every search result. I know I’ll need them some day.

At Sage Hill Writing Experience, Wayne Grady had stressed the importance of keeping a bibliography for non-fiction. I had been keeping track of my sources but did not have a system to record the sources in my manuscript. I decide to go back and start again and do it properly. In my manuscript I now keep track of each source that can be cross-checked against the bibliography. Although it was frustrating redoing the work, I was grateful in the end that I did.