Finding Relatives in Russian Empire Records for Non-Russian Speakers

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington (JGSGW) will host the program, Finding Relatives in Russian Empire Records for Non-Russian Speakers presented by Lara Diamond. Activities begin at 1:00 PM including consultations with our genealogy “mavens” followed by the program beginning at 1:30 PM.

More and more Russian Empire records are becoming accessible online, but few are indexed. But for those who don’t speak Russian, browsing through the records in old-style Russian handwriting can be daunting. This talk will focus on how to identify, within various types of Russian Empire records, records relating to a researcher’s family, in spite of not having any Russian language background. The talk will also cover various sources for online Russian Empire documents and discuss how to leverage these for one’s own research.

Lara Diamond 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 as a chauffeur. She has traced all branches of her family back to Europe and most 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. She is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland, leads JewishGen’s Sub Carpathian SIG, is on Ukraine SIG’s board of directors, and runs several town-focused projects to collect documentation to assist all those researching ancestors from common towns. She is a frequent speaker at genealogy conferences, and blogs about her mostly Eastern European research at http://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com.

JGSGW Guest Attendance Policy:
Meetings and most events are free to JGSGW members. Non-members may attend open events, but not those that are members-only, for a fee of $5 which will be applied toward JGSGW membership if the guest joins at the same event. Attendees who require personal assistance due to a health condition or disability may bring an assistant at no charge.

The Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to helping people discover, document and share their family history.

For questions or to request accommodations contact: