June Meeting to Feature Lara Diamond
The Second Life Virtual Genealogical Society is pleased to present Lara Diamond as the speaker for the June 2018 chapter meeting. Lara’s talk is titled “Reconstructing the Rutners: Tracing a family through changing borders & Languages.”
European borders were fluid, meaning that records for one family can be written in many languages and kept in disparate locations. This talk examines one large family that lived in the area that now spans the Ukraine/Romanian border. They lived there while it was part of Hungary, Czechoslovakia & Romania, Hungary again, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Records from this area were kept in multiple languages and are currently held in several modern countries and different archives within those countries. What ended up being a very large family was reconstructed using a variety of methods, including religious records, vital records, census enumerations, Holocaust documents, DNA and more. This talk will discuss how the family was reconstructed over the course of decades, bringing the family back to the 1700s and tracing distant cousins across the world.
WHEN: Sunday, 10 June 2018
TIME: 5:30 p.m. SLT (same as Pacific Time)
WHERE: The Fire Pit at Just Genealogy SLurl
About Lara Diamond
Lara Diamond has been researching her family for 25 years, starting as a middle school student. She has traced all branches of her family multiple generations back in Europe using Russian Empire-era and Austria-Hungarian Empire records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland. And she is an Ashkenazic Jew, she gets to have particular fun with her completely endogamous genome.
Lara is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen’s Subcarpathian SIG, is on JewishGen’s Ukraine SIG’s board of directors. She also runs multiple district- and town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns.
Lara blogs about DNA and her Eastern European research at Lara’s Jewnealogy.
