Speakers: Joy Kestenbaum, Lauren Shulsky Orenstein, and Lynn Diamond

The meeting will start at 1:30 PM with open discussion. Feel free to bring questions or a brief statement of a brick wall for the group to address, time permitting.

The formal meeting will begin at 2:00 PM. Three members of JGSNY’s Executive Council, Joy Kestenbaum, Lauren Shulsky Orenstein and Lynn Diamond, will each present a case study that demonstrates how they solved a genealogical research problem.

Joy, Vice President Programming, will show how she was able to identify a great-great-aunt, who died almost 150 years ago, by researching collateral relatives in American and Galician records and using indirect evidence. The first wife of Joy’s great-grandfather and the older sister of her great-grandmother, this aunt was long forgotten by her many descendants.

Lauren will speak about her search for a connection between two families from Lithuania with the same unusual surname. The search spanned years of research and many resources before finally being solved with an often-overlooked document.

Lynn, Vice President Communications, will show how she used hypotheses, records, and descendancy analysis to connect three branches of her tree in the United States and Israel, all descending from her second great-grandfather from Dubrowna (now in Belarus). None of the three branches' descendants had known about the others’ existence.

For bios of the speakers, visit: https://jgsny.org/about-us/executive-council-bios.

We hope that in the future other JGS members will come forward to share how they broke down a brick wall and that this will become a regular annual program. Please email program@jgsny.org with a brief description of your genealogical research discovery if you are interested in presenting