Gary Mokotoff

Gary Mokotoff is an author, lecturer, and leader of Jewish genealogy. He is the first person to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS).

He is the author of a number of books including the award-winning Where Once We Walked, a gazetteer that provides information about 23,500 towns in central and eastern Europe where Jews lived before the Holocaust, How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust, and Getting Started in Jewish Genealogy. He also wrote the "Jewish American Research" chapter in The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogyand is co-editor of the book Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy.

Gary is also known for his application of computers to genealogy. Among his accomplishments is co-authorship of the Daitch-Mokotoff soundex system; the JewishGen Family Finder, a database of ancestral towns and surnames being researched by some 50,000 Jewish genealogists throughout the world; Family Tree of the Jewish people; and the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index. He is publisher of Avotaynu, the magazine of Jewish genealogy, and a past president of IAJGS. He is/was on the Board of Directors of the Federation of Genealogical Societies, Association of Professional Genealogists, JewishGen, Association of Jewish Book Publishers, and Jewish Book Council.