Genealogy-related questions have been top heavy for the library’s reference department throughout the last 10 years and responding to them has been made both easier and more difficult with the internet and the array of databases available to us; moreover, the network of experts all too willing to collaborate with us has been extensive but the challenge for us has been like shopping in a grocery that previously stocked 3 kinds of mustard but which now stocks 60. If you were fortunate enough to have access to Stanley Diamond, he knew the right mustard each time or if you didn’t, he knew someone who did.

Stanley passed away on December 18th, 2024. Dozens of bios are scattered throughout the internet detailing his earlier life as a successful entrepreneur, his path to genealogy through his discovery that he was a carrier of the beta thalassemia gene in the late 1970s, the creation and guidance of his work through JRI Poland and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal, and his active participation in international genealogy conferences (and most recently, as an associate of the L’Dor V’Dor foundation. His work in helping people converge with unknown areas of their past established his expertise as a reliable voice and a distiller of genealogy infoglut facilitated by the internet. When, after a week of searching and trying to connect the dots failed us at the library, a phone call or email to Stanley returned the missing link within a few minutes -- usually accompanied by additional details the researcher hadn’t even asked for in the first place; this allowed us to learn Stanley’s tricks and methodologies. A call to Stanley meant being treated to one of his recent successes: an anecdote that invariably centred on two people separated by thousands of miles and decades who, as he discovered, were related to one another either through adoption or marriage kept secret from the family. Stanley’s work changed more lives than one can imagine, provided closure to people who lived with lingering questions.

Two incidents come to mind: In the mid-1990s, a frightened elderly man “Laszlo” was led into the library by a volunteer from the Montreal Holocaust Museum. On March 19th, 1944, the Nazis occupied his hometown of Nyíregyháza in Hungary. On Passover (April 17), SS units herded Jews from the town and the thirty-six surrounding villages totaling 11,000, into the ghetto. Laszlo, then 4 years old was given over to a non-Jewish couple who raised him. After the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, he emigrated to Montreal, eventually married, and raised a family on Montreal's south shore. His wife had insisted that he leave the past behind: his trip to the MHM was made without her knowledge. Following his visit, he was led in by a volunteer and in halting English, he explained that all he wanted to find out was what had happened to his parents. He refused to give his phone number while we were to conduct our research. He would return in 3 weeks’ time for news.

For the next 2 weeks, we searched genealogical databases, consulted with experts in Jewish genealogy, emailed officials in Hungary and Israel, and finally, it was on Stanley’s advice that we were led to an association of Nyíregyháza survivors in Israel. We contacted them with the names of Laszlo's parents, and within a few days, received a copy of his parents’ death certificate, as well as a detailed listing of the names of inhabitants of Laszlo's quarter, where they had been deported and when they had perished in Auschwitz. Consider that these were in the days prior to Yad Vashem's database of Holocaust victims. When Laszlo returned, we presented him with a large file consisting of our research. He took it over to a study carrel and read through it quietly. We never saw him again but what ended up as routine research on our part allowed Laszlo to close a 40-year breach in his life.

The second occurrence happened in 2020 and again in 2022 when we ran genealogy workshops with young students at JPPS-Bialik. The idea was to get them talking to their parents and grandparents, scan our legacy issues of The Montreal Gazette, and create a family tree. The first class was given by Stanley and Gary Perlman, an IT specialist who amongst other things, has devoted part of his retirement life to photographing the gravestones of Montreal’s Jews and linking them onto a vital genealogical database, the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry. It was in that class that we encountered a taste of the kind of work for which Stanley was known. I had brought a collection of four printed volumes of genealogical tables that had been compiled and donated to the library several years earlier by someone

who came to the library one day. Despite never having met me, he claimed to know me and members of my immediate family. As it turns out, he did; he was related by marriage through another branch of my grandfather’s family, and he needed some additional details from me to fill in some blanks.

I showed these books to the students and after I had finished speaking about how far some genealogists will extend their research back through several generations – in my case the Litwin Family – one student at the front of the class piped up, “Hey -- I’m also a Litwin.” Apparently, my newly discovered young third cousin had done his own family tree before the assignment was even handed out and had gone back on his own several generations without knowing that these books existed.

Diamonds take between 1 to 3 billion years to form. Stanley’s work was a testament to patience, and a selfless understanding of how connections sustain communities. The JPL will miss him.