DNA Successes In--And Despite Of--Endogamy with Lara Diamond

On May 13th join the Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh and The Rauh Jewish Archives in welcoming genealogist Lara Diamond

where she will discuss the topic of endogamy within genetic genealogy.

DNA Successes In--And Despite Of--Endogamy

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.

Lara Diamond has been researching her family for 25 years, starting as a middle school student. Her maternal family emigrated

directly to Pittsburgh and McKeesport. 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, 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.

Please arrive by 11:00 so that we can begin with a short Q/A session before Lara begins at 11:30. The floor will be open for those

who have questions about their own research. There will be time afterwards to ask Lara questions as well.