My Diamond (formerly Diment) grandparents were Holocaust survivors. My grandfather came to America with his two surviving siblings after his parents and two other siblings were killed in the Holocaust. I've since managed to connect with descendants of two of his father's siblings--one because of a DNA match in which we learned that my grandfather's Aunt Shaindel had emigrated to Michigan rather than dying in the Holocaust like we'd thought, and then because of intensive paper-trail research where I found descendants of my grandfather's Uncle Leibish. But now I have found descendants of one of my grandfather's half siblings, halfway across the world! My father has a new-to-us half-second cousin, and a Holocaust survivor who lived most of her life in Ukraine (now living in Germany) who thought she had no relatives on her father's side has found out that she has a large family.
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| Email from MyHeritage about a new--and intriguing--match |
MyHeritage sends weekly emails highlighting new matches. Often they're relatively distant, and being that I'm Jewish (so have to deal with endogamy), they're often not worth pursuing. But just last week, MyHeritage sent an email with a very intriguing match.
A woman named Isabella Diment shared 173cM of DNA with me, including some large segments. Diment/Diamond is a relatively common surname, but I looked at some of my other kits, and sure enough, she shared large amounts of DNA with my father, his Diamond first cousins, as well as those cousins descended from my grandfather's Aunt Shaindel. Could Isabella be closely related on my Diamond/Diment side? If so, how?
I reached out to Stanislav who administers Isabella's kit, and it turns out that he is Isabella's grandson. He told me that Isabella's father had died in 1941 when Isabella was 5 years old, so Isabella knew little of her father's family. But she did know that his name was Leizer-Wolf Jakovlevich, or Leizer-Wolf son of Jakob. And she knew that he was born in 1906 in Odesa. I went onto JewishGen and found that 1906 Odesa births had been indexed, which saved my having to read through the whole year's births--and look what I found:
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| Birth of Leizer-Volf Diment; Odesa; June 1906 |
Leizer-Volf Diment was, indeed, born in Odesa in 1906. And his birth record gave the names of both his father and paternal grandfather--Yankel and Hillel, and it says that they were registered in Kiselin--the same place as my Diment/Diamond family. Well, now I knew exactly how Leizer-Volf was related to me.
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| Birth of Yankel Diment, Torchyn, 1861 |
Yankel Diment was the son of my great-great grandfather Hillel and his first wife Sima. I'd had Yankel's birth record (above) for several years, but other than that, I'd never found mention of him in local records. But it turns out that is because he'd moved rather far from his hometown in Volhynia, all the way to Odesa in Kherson Guberniya. I don't know how or why he moved there, but he does seem to have moved around 1900 based on his not appearing in Odesa when the 1897 census was taken and also based on when his children were born.
I've been emailing back and forth with Stanislav, sharing what I'm finding on his grandmother's immediate family for him to share with her. It turns out she had evacuated Odesa to Uzbekistan during WWII along with her mother and brother, but her father Leizer-Wolf was killed in 1941. I was able to share photos that I found of Leizer-Wolf with Stanislav and Isabella, giving her back at least one small piece of the father she lost so young.
I'm still chasing some more leads--Isabella remembers a aunt and cousin who also lived in Odesa, and I'm trying to find information on them.
This shows how important it is to have your DNA on as many platforms as possible. I'd found Aunt Shaindel's family in Detroit because of having my DNA on FamilyTreeDNA. I found Isabella and Stanislav from a match on MyHeritage. I've also had successes on Ancestry and 23AndMe (although not to this extent). It also shows how DNA in and of itself won't show you how you're connected; it was only because I've collected documentation on my family for years that I was able to figure out how Isabella was connected to my part of the family.
After 85+ years since our branches had been in contact, DNA testing has brought us together again!
I'm now on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/laradiamond.bsky.socialYou can like my page on Facebook:
or follow @larasgenealogy on Twitter/X.
Such a wonderful outcome to have reconnected with this part of the family after so many decades. And as you say, it's because you had done the homework and could match her with the paper trail that confirmed the connection. Congratulations.
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