Gary Mokotoff

Who is Gary Mokotoff?

Gary Mokotoff is an American genealogist who focuses primarily on Jewish genealogy. He is the first person to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies for which he was president. He is the author/coauthor of a number of books including Where Once We Walked, a gazetteer which 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 was co-editor of Avotaynu Guide to Jewish Genealogy.

Mokotoff 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 84,000 Jewish genealogists throughout the world and the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index.

He is co-owner of Avotaynu, a company that publishes books of interest to Jewish genealogical researchers as well as the journal Avotaynu.