Our ancestors often moved—and even if your direct line didn’t, you almost certainly had cousins who did. This presentation follows two families—one rooted in the Russian Empire and the other in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—each traced across six generations of movement and migration. Despite living in an era long before modern transportation, these families journeyed far more widely than one might expect.
The talk highlights a wide array of record types used to reconstruct these histories, offering specific examples from each family line and demonstrating how descendants left a rich and varied paper trail across Europe and beyond.
About Lara Diamond
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.