NORTH ATTLEBORO -- There had long been a rumor in Ameena Winfield's family that her father's ancestors had arrived in Virginia on one of the first slave ships.

She always thought it could n't be true. Then four years ago, one of her uncles died, and as she was entering his passing in the family bible, she saw the list of all the rela tives she never knew.

`` I got to wondering who are these people,'' said Winfield, a resident of North Attleboro for the past eight years.

So she kept the story of the slave ship in mind and set out to find her roots on the Inter net and on the phone, and at the family history center in Franklin.

She kept hitting a wall and could not get past her greatgrandfather in the 1870s. So when her large extended family of 50 or more relatives gathered for their traditional Thanksgiving dinner, she told them of her research, and of her belief that the rumor prob ably wasn't true.

But she never stopped searching, and eventually found the missing link -- a white English woman who had given birth to a mulatto child and who ended up as a slave of Robert Carter, the wealthy Virginia plantation owner who willingly freed up to 500 slaves long before emancipation.

At the next Thanksgiving dinner, Winfield shocked her family when she told them that the story was true after all.

One of their ancestors, she said, was among the first group of slaves freed by Carter, and could in fact be traced to those first ships.

Her search didn't stop there. Winfield kept going, uncovering generations of ancestors and some Native American roots in her mother's lineage.

Today she will retrace her steps at a workshop she will lead as part of the annual family history and genealogical conference in Franklin sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Now in its sixth year, the conference used to be held at the family research center in Foxboro until it closed last year and relocated to the Franklin chapel.

The center is where Winfield did much of her research, and where she made several major discoveries.

`` I would not have been able to get started without them,'' she said of the people there who guided her journey.

The center at 91 Jordan Road is open to the public from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, and from 7 to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Computers are set up for public use, and the public can also order microfilm from the church's main archive center in Salt Lake City. Today's free conference is also at the center, and opens at 8:30 a.m. with registration, then a choice of several workshops at 9:30 and at 10:40 a.m., and at 12:50 and 2 p.m. Details are available at www.fredwild.com/FamilyHistory2006.

Latter-day Saints operate more than 4,000 of these centers around the world. Their dedication to genealogy stems from their belief that religious rituals called ordinances should be performed on behalf of deceased relatives, and that church members therefore have the obligation to trace their ancestors.

But anyone can use their research centers and Web sites, and Winfield has found them invaluable.

She was there twice a week for more than two years, and in between she researched on her own, using the Internet and calling places like courthouses and historical societies in various states to check on records and to have copies sent to her.

She ended up compiling stacks of files and documents, and putting together charts and maps that trace her ancestors.

`` Once you get involved, it's very addictive,'' said Winfield, who has a master's degree in education and works for a construction management firm in Boston. `` The more I found out, the more I wanted to find out.''

She learned to mentally `` step out of the box,'' set aside any preconceived notions, do a lot of critical thinking and follow the trail, and to not necessarily accept anything as true until she checked it out.

Those lessons served her well when she began looking into another family tale that her father's father had fled a near-lynching in Mississippi. He never talked about that prior life, but had always slept with a gun, so the family was convinced that something terrible had happened to him.

Winfield began tracing him through his known name, William Johnson, but kept running into a family named Benson.

Eventually, she discovered that he had been born as an entirely different person and was in fact a Benson, but had taken on a new identity when he left the South and came to the Boston area, where he bought a house and raised a family.

`` I felt like I was going to pass out,'' Winfield said of the discovery. `` No wonder I could not find William Johnson. He did not exist.''

Then at the next Thanksgiving gathering, Winfield explained to her extended family just who her grandfather really was. Her aunts and uncles were shocked.

Meanwhile, Winfield's 85-year-old mother began wondering about her own ancestry. So Winfield decided to look into it, and recalled the time in her childhood when she was going on an overnight trip with the Campfire Girls to the Ponkapoag campsite in Canton, and her mother said that was where her people were from.

She began researching through the Massachusetts Archives and then through the New England Indian Council in Boston.

Two weeks later, she received an e-mail from the council welcoming her to the tribe and outlining her mother's genealogy back to the 1600s and King Philip's War.

In the mixed lineage of Native American and African-American descent was an aunt that Winfield's mother never knew she had, and that led her to find cousins and their children in the Neponsett area of Boston who her mother never knew existed.

When they contacted the relatives, they were invited to the next family gathering.

`` I took her to meet her people,'' Winfield said.

Now her mother has settled where her ancestors once lived, in Neponsett, but at a senior housing complex.

`` She's home,'' Winfield said.

There is more research ahead for Winfield, including a trip to Virginia this spring where some of her father's relatives still live. While there, she plans to check more records, and visit the burial ground that is still intact on the Carter property.

`` I have to go,'' Winfield said. `` I have to stand there, and be where my people were.''

Come Thanksgiving, she will be giving her family an update. But one day, she hopes to hand each one of them a copy of the book she plans to write that will include all her findings, and copies of all the many documents she has compiled, including Carter's list of slaves and the dates they were freed -- events that were described in a 2005 book, `` The First Emancipator.''

`` Every year, I shoot for Thanksgiving,'' Winfield said of her own book. `` Maybe it will be this Thanksgiving.''

But she still has a lot of people left to find.

`` Somebody had to do this,'' she said of her journey that began out of the blue the day she picked up the family bible and read the names from the past.

`` I believe they wanted to be found,'' she said. `` They picked a good person. I never give up.''