One of the most remarkable collections of “death certificates” is now on the Internet. They are the Pages of Testimony located at an institution called Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. They document more than 3,000,000 Jews murdered in the Holocaust. But for the circumstances that caused their creation, they are a genealogical gold mine. The database is located at www.yadvashem.org.

Starting in 1955, Yad Vashem, the principal institution in the world that documents and memorializes the Holocaust, requested people to come forward and identify family and friends who were murdered in the Holocaust. To date, half of the victims of the Holocaust have been documented in this manner. The information is provided on a preprinted form called a “Page of Testimony.” It gives information about the victim, including name; place and year of birth; place, date, and circumstances of death; occupation; maiden name for married women and maiden name of spouse for married men; names of mother, father, and spouse; and, in some cases, names and ages of children.

Each submitter is required to sign the document and show his or her name, address, and relationship to the deceased. By submitting this form, the person testifies (hence its name) that he or she knew of the victim and the circumstances surrounding the victim's death. The majority of the submitters are relatives of the deceased. Most Pages of Testimony were submitted in the late 1950s when the project started.

Pages of Testimony are helping to fill in the blanks of the extended families of many genealogists. For example my grandmother was one of three sisters, two of whom immigrated to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. The third remained in Poland and was killed in the Holocaust. The only information I had about my grandaunt was her name gleaned from an inscription on the back of a picture of her and her two young children taken in 1914 and sent to my grandmother, Fanny Wlodawer Mokotoff. It identified her as Sarah Centner and her two children, Jacob and Zipporah.

Searching for Sarah in the online database, there were four Pages for women with the same name. I was able to identify my grandaunt because of information already known to me: her maiden name (Wlodawer) and names of her parents--my great-grandparents (Jacob and Shava). Remarkably, if that 1914 photograph did not exist, I would have found her anyway in the database because of the uniqueness of maiden name and name of parents. The Page of Testimony was submitted by one of her daughters who immigrated to the Holyland before the Holocaust

The search engine is very well designed. An unusual aspect is a synonym feature. Because people may have submitted a victim's name in a variety of ways, a synonym table causes names to be searched in a variety of ways. An analogy would be a search for a person with the given name Charles, would retrieve any person named Charles, Charlie, or Chuck. The same applies to family names. My own name has a number of spelling variants including Mokotoff, Mokotov and Mokotow.

A very useful feature is the ability to retrieve Pages of Testimony by submitter. I retrieved all the documents submitted by the daughter and was able to get the name of Sarah's husband (Hanoch), her son (which I knew from the 1914 photograph) and the name of the son's wife, including her maiden name (Sarah Rotszild).

Most of the submitters were Israelis therefore most of the documents are in Hebrew. Since the majority of people using the database throughout the world do not read Hebrew, the site provides an English-language translation on the contents of each document.

The Advanced Search feature permits searches on virtually any field in the database. Each field has the option of being searched by actual spelling, Soundex, synonym (the default), or fuzzy. The last deals with common spelling mistakes such as single character errors (“Sarah” will find “Satah.”) or transpositions (“Malka” will find “Makla”).

The online database is reuniting families where individuals thought they were the sole survivors. There was a recent newspaper account of sisters who were reunited because one had searched the Pages of Testimony for family. Each thought the other had died in the Holocaust.

For genealogists, the database has linked them with living relatives who were the signers of the Pages of Testimony. In my case, I was able to determine that the daughter of my grandaunt had since died but I was able to locate her children, my second cousins. They were not only elated that I contacted them, but I was able to provide them with pictures of their family that were more than seventy-five years old that they did not have in their possession. These images were part of the photograph collection of my grandmother that I inherited from my father.

Jewish-American genealogy is done differently than conventional genealogy. Most Jewish-Americans do not trace their ancestry but instead document their families. That is, they go back as many generations as possible, rarely earlier than the late eighteenth century, and then come forward and document all the descendants of their most-distant ancestor. To date, I have documented more than 1,400 descendants of my great-great-great-grandfather Tuvia David Mokotow. Of these people, more than 300 were murdered in the Holocaust.

I, personally, have filled out seventy-five Pages of Testimony that are on file at Yad Vashem. They were submitted in the 1980s when I first become involved in genealogy. I have since forgotten which family members I had submitted. Using my own name in the search-by-submitter feature, I can now identify these persons and provide Pages of Testimony for those family members not yet memorialized.

Gary Mokotoff is an author, lecturer, and leader of Jewish-American 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 and 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 and the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index. Gary is publisher of Avotaynu, the magazine of Jewish genealogy and past president of IAJGS.

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