What is now Zakarpattya Oblast in Ukraine had a large Jewish population starting in the early 1800s. This part of the world switched hands from being part of Hungary to Czechoslovakia, back to Hungary, then to USSR, and to Ukraine—with Subcarpathian Rus for a short time in the middle. This impacts where and what type of records were kept for both the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the area. There are even Holocaust-era records available that can help trace these families back to the 1700s or early 1800s in many cases. This talk shows how these records were leveraged for just one such family living in this area, finding records kept in multiple languages and held in many modern countries and archives in those countries. This large family was reconstructed using a variety of methods, including religious records, vital records, census enumerations, Holocaust documents, Yizkor books, DNA, and more, bringing the family back to the 1700s and tracing distant cousins across the world. Also learn about the large and growing Subcarpathia collection on JewishGen, including some searching tips to make sure you don't miss records critical to your research.
About the Speaker:
Lara Diamond began researching her own family around 1989. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Eastern Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her personal research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. She has done client research leading to their ancestors in many parts of the former USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and more. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, is JewishGen’s Director of Subcarpathia Research, and is a strategic advisor to JewishGen’s Ukraine Research Division. She has lectured around the country and internationally on Jewish and Eastern European genealogy research as well as genetic genealogy. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. Lara blogs about her Eastern European and Jewish research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.
This session will be held in person at the Museum's Studio.