
Stanley Diamond, a leading figure in the Jewish genealogy world and co-founder and executive director of the non-profit, online database JRI (Jewish Records Indexing)-Poland, passed away December 18 in Montreal. He was 91.
Founded in 1995, JRI-Poland has grown to include access to more nearly nine million records and images covering nearly two million towns and settlements and is the biggest single-country resource in Jewish genealogy.
Among its resources are indexes and documentation of Jewish cemeteries, photos, and transcriptions of epitaphs.
In tributes posted after his death, colleagues and family history researchers described Diamond as a giant in the Jewish genealogy field and father of Jewish genealogy on the internet.
Diamond became interested in genealogy in the late 1970s, when a nephew was diagnosed as a carrier of a genetic condition that could have serious effects on children of carriers. Diamond tried to trace members of his family in order to alert them.
He ended up constructing his family tree, using a varied mix of resources and reference tools. He eventually co-founded JRI-Poland in order to centralize all available records and resources, making it a sort of one stop shop for family historians with roots in Poland.
Diamond attended McGill University and then got an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He ran a successful decorative ceiling business before getting involved with Jewish genealogy.
May his memory be a blessing!
Read an interview with Diamond from 2017