Summary
Co-Sponsored by JewishGen.org at the Museum of Jewish Heritage Genetic genealogy is much more complicated when dealing with endogamous populations than the general population, and many people get frustrated when trying to identify actual relatives from the mass of genetic cousins who are actually related in many ways quite far back. Learn how you can have success when dealing with endogamy by examining stories from the speaker's own family's DNA, which include reuniting with branches thought killed in the Holocaust.
Speaker Bio
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. As she is an Ashkenazic Jew, she gets to have particular fun with her completely endogamous genome. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen's Subcarpathian SIG, and 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. She blogs about DNA and her Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.