RE:nobody told meStares is Keats by all rights.
Prospecting goes back more than a century for the Keats family. His great great grandfather, Souley Joe Keats of the Mikmaq band, found silver mineralization while out trapping one day.
“He died before he could show anyone, but the story stayed in our family,” Keats says.
That’s what prompted Keats’s grandfather and father to approach Noranda. The company wasn’t looking for silver but it was looking for prospectors, and from there, a mining family was born.
Currently, 21 of Keats’s relatives are employed in the mining industry. In 2006, the Keats-Stares family received the Bill Dennis Prospector of the Year Award (Stares is the maiden name of Keats’s mother).
After years of thinking about starting his own exploration company, Keats decided to go ahead with his dream in 2007, after his cousin, Steven Stares, president and CEO of Benton Resources (BTC-V, BNRJF-O) (named after the town), gave him a pep talk.
“He said, ‘Kev, you should just do this,'” Keats recalls.