Success In -- In Spite of -- Endogamy

Presented with The Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles Genetic genealogy is particularly daunting for those whose forebears come from endogamous populations (such as Ashkenazi Jews, Native Hawaiians and Cajuns, who have married in a closed group for generations). The work of identifying actual relatives from the mass of genetic distantly-related family can be frustrating. Drawing on case studies, this lecture explains how you can have success in such a situation. For Lara Diamond, this work has led to reunification with many relatives, including a family branch thought to have been killed in the Holocaust. 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.