In a little over a week, I will be landing in Warsaw, meeting up not only with my spectacular team of researchers there, but also, meeting up with colleagues, clients, and even my own relatives!  Genealogical research for me, is very personal, even when I am doing client research. After all, as a descendant of Eastern European  Jews, I know I am related somehow, to a large percentage of other Jews whose ancestry can be traced to Eastern Europe. Can I identify all those relationships? Probably not, but through DNA matches and documentation, I have certainly found a lot of cousins, some of whom I’ve met but many more with whom I’m in contact via phone and email.

At this year’s conference in Warsaw, I know I’ll be seeing two cousins who I met for the first time in person at previous IAJGS conferences.

Let the fun begin!

I have been studying the maps of Eastern Europe and going over our routes and I am amazed at the directions in which we will be traveling, the sights we will see and the records I anticipate that we will discover.

Starting in Warsaw, we leave on 8 August late afternoon for Marijampolė, Lithuania. The next day, we drive to Kaunas where we will stay until the morning of August 12.  While based in Kaunas, we’ll be going to Vilkija, Raseiniai, Grinkiškis, and Krakės.  On the 12th we leave for Vilnius where we will be until the morning of the 15th.  August 15 is a holiday and all the public buildings will be closed, so we’ll use that opportunity to leisurely drive to Suwałki, Poland where we will begin research on the morning of the 16th.  We’ll continue in Łomża, and Białystok until the 18th.  Then we leave for Ukraine.

We’ll be driving a circuitous route, spending a night in Kovel and then on 19 August driving through Lutsk to Kiev.  After a day of research in Kiev, we leave for Khmelnietsky where we hope to gain better insight into the records held there which were moved after the 2003 fire destroyed some of the holdings in the archives in Kamenets–Podolsk, Ukraine.  After leaving Khmelnietsky we head for Vinnitsa and our last stop in Ukraine – Mogilev-Podolsk.

On August 22, we’ll be crossing the border into Moldova where we head off to Chișinău. By August 24,  we’ll be in Iași, Romania, right over the border from Moldova.  Then, by the 25 we will have crossed the border back into Ukraine going through Kuty to Ivano-Frankivsk. From there on the 26, we go to Lviv and then cross the border back into Poland for the last few days of our trip.

In Poland, we will be going first to Przemyśl then on to Sanok and Rszeszow, stopping in Wielopole on the way to Kraków.  On the evening of 29 August we return to Warsaw where (very) early the next morning we head to the airport to return to the US.  I am sure that as exhausted as we will be, the trip will be very satisfying from a research perspective as well as being a cultural eye-opener.  All of us will have been to at least one of the countries we will be visiting, but none of us have been to all of these countries.