A Second Cousin Found - How DNA Helped a Holocaust Survivor Connect to My Family

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.

Email from MyHeritage about a new--and intriguing--match

Eastern European Archives' Webpages / Finding more Diments

Eastern European archives historically did not have much of a web presence, and those that had webpages generally didn't have digitized records.  Well, that has changed over the last decade!  The Polish State Archives and the Latvian State Historical Archives are at the forefront of making records accessible by digitization.  But other countries are catching up--including Ukraine.  Despite the current war (and perhaps as a consequence, with archives realizing that physical records are in danger), Ukrainian archives continue to digitize records.  I keep a close eye on branches that would hold records for my ancestral towns, following their Facebook pages, and looking at their webpages to watch for newly-added digitized records. Most of those records aren't for towns I'm researching (but perhaps they cover areas of interest to you).  But some are.

Chaim-Lejb Diment & Family; 1920 Lutsk Census (page 1)

Probable Relatives Becoming Definite Relatives - Keep Track of Those Stray Branches!

I'll often find a family with the surname that I'm researching, in a place nearby where my family lived, but where I don't know for sure how (or even if!) they are actually related to me.  I keep track of these families and often can connect them into my larger trees later; other times I'm able to prove that they're actually not related to the family I've been researching.  I'm always glad later that I've kept track of these stray branches, because the information is often helpful.

Birth of Yerachmiel Diment; Torchin; 1926