2020 IAJGS Volunteer of the Year

Gary Perlman

On August 12, 2020, I was named the IAJGS.org 2020 Volunteer of the Year. IAJGS is the International Association of over 90 Jewish Genealogy Societies.

Press Releases

  1. Canadian Jewish Record (archived copy)
  2. Westmount Independent
  3. The Suburban
  4. Montreal Jewish Magazine
  5. DavisDNA

Citation

In recognition of his outstanding support of Jewish Genealogy in Canada, the IAJGS is honored to name Gary Perlman as the 2020 IAJGS Volunteer of the Year. Gary has submitted more than 60,000 records and photos to JewishGen's JOWBR project, updated more than 2,000 gravestone images on JOWBR from Montreal's Rack River Cemetery and 7000 records to better document broken, leaning, faded or Hebrew-only stones, made more than 10,000 corrections and additions to the Baron De Hirsch Cemetery's in-house data, photographed and documented Holocaust and War Casualty Memorials while adding Holocaust text to JOWBR records. In addition, Gary has linked supplemental genealogical information directly from JOWBR search results to the JGS-Montreal website and created the Jewish Genealogy Dashboard, a multi-source search engine, publicly available on the JGS Montreal website, enabling users to run a search across some 50 databases from a single webpage. Finally, Gary assisted the Documentation of Jewish Records Worldwide (Do]R) and is a member of the technical team providing expertise related to working with OCLC Online Computer Library Center in the development of WorldCat.

International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank my JGS-Montreal mentors, Stanley Diamond (who taught me so much during his family tree workshops) and Merle Kastner (who got me into photographing gravestones), along with many other JGS-Montreal members.

I'd also like to thank Patti Derstenfeld and Kim Fairchild, for giving me the opportunity to share that knowledge with residents at the Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre.

Finally, I'd like to thank about a dozen volunteers, acknowledged on the JGS-Montreal.org web pages (1, 2), who helped crop photos, add data, and check records for submission to JOWBR, and most recently, to the JewishGen Memorial Plaques.