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Presenter: Hal Bookbinder

An ancestral town may have been under the rule of several countries over time. Recognizing which governments were in control at various times can help in understanding the environment in which ancestors lived, events that stimulated migration, languages in which records were kept and likely locations where these records might be found. As the Russian Empire expanded west in the 17th and 18th centuries, millions of Jews found themselves within the Empire and Russia found that it needed to deal with a people it had tried to exclude for hundreds of years. This lecture traces a millennium of border changes in Eastern Europe and the impacts of these changes on our Jewish ancestors. (Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Bessarabia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia)