I am getting really excited about the upcoming IAJGS conference in Warsaw, taking place in August 2018. The conference itself will, I’m sure be awesome, and I love going to each year’s conference – for me it’s the highlight of the summer.  This year’s conference in Eastern Europe has opened a door to opportunities beyond the conference.

My team at ancestryProGenenealogists specializes in Eastern European and Jewish research. Of course, we couldn’t resist the draw of the Warsaw conference and we are going on an adventure after the conference! For all of August we’ll be traveling and doing client research, getting photos and background material in a lot of places. We start of course, in Warsaw, and then head for Marijampolė, Kaunas, Raiseinai, Vilkija, Vilnius, Łomża, Białystok, Kovel, Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa, Mohyliv-Podilskyy, Chişinău, Iaşi, Kuty, Ivano-Frankivsk, Stryy, Lviv, Sanok, Rzeszów, Przemyśl, Limanowa, Kraków.

We start our adventure on August 3 and I’ll be blogging with photos daily. I’m sure that it will be a journey filled with discoveries. Part of our plan is to photograph the remains of the Jewish cemeteries in the smaller areas we visit, and contribute those to JewishGen’s JOWBR.  When I was in Ukraine in 2009, I arranged for the large cemetery in Zhytomyr to be photographed and a team of us translated the almost 3,000 stones there and those have been online for the last few years, at JOWBR.