Lara Diamond is President of JGS Maryland and has been researching her family for 25 years, since she was too young to have a driver’s license and had to rely on her mother to drive her to the National Archives.

She has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most multiple generations back using Russian Empire-era records. Most of her research is in modern-day Ukraine, with a smattering of Belarus and Poland.

She blogs about her mostly Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.

“Ancestral Towns May Not Have Been So Ancestral!” (Weds-101), 4:30-5:45 P.M.

Many researchers, once they have discovered the town from which their ancestors left Eastern Europe, assume that their families must have lived in that town or the vicinity for many generations. While this was true for some families, there was significant movement through broad swaths of Europe by many Jews for a variety of reasons.

The speaker will demonstrate the breadth of some families’ movements with examples from her own research and will discuss the types of documents used to trace those families’ travels.

Topics: Ashkenazic research, Immigration and migration over the ages