Laurens County, South Carolina native, LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, is offering her recently published book for sale in booth number 324.

Board-certified since 2015, LaBrenda was elected as a trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists in 2016 and is a frequent speaker at national and local venues. She enjoyed a 35-year career as a tax lawyer before her 2013 retirement form Ernst & Young. Now a full-time genealogist, LaBrenda took first place in the category for published authors in the 2013 International Society of Family History Writers and Editors “Excellence-in-Writing Competition,” and has also published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, among other publications.

In 2016 she released her guide and selected finding aids for researching African Americans in Laurens County, South Carolina; this book was hailed as an important model for others by Kenneth H. Thomas Jr. in his long-running genealogy column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. As Thomas’s review notes, this guide is centered on one county, “but others could take this and search the same sources for any county in South Carolina or interpolate those sources for other states.”