Transcribe Galician Jewish Vital Records

Jewish records from Austrian Galicia survive in quantity, spread across archives in Warsaw and Lviv, and they have a shape of their own. They are ruled into printed columns - entry number, date and place of birth, date and place of circumcision or naming, the child, the sex, whether the birth was legitimate, the parents, the witnesses, the midwife - and filled in by hand in German, Polish, or both. Jewish communities were permitted their own registers from 1789, but most of what survives dates from the 1830s or later.

KleioBase reads those registers and translates them into English, then links every person, date and place into one connected family archive. Reading is where it starts.

How KleioBase reads Galician Jewish records

You upload a scan or a photo of the register page. KleioBase reads the columns, whichever language each is in, and gives you a transcription in the original alongside an English translation. It then extracts the people, dates, places and relationships.

The illegitimacy column needs reading, not believing. Many Jewish couples married in a religious ceremony the state did not register, so their children were entered as illegitimate, often under the mother's surname. Sometimes the father is named in the entry and sometimes he is not. Where he is, KleioBase records the child, the mother and the father as separate people, so the family can be linked even though the register may file the child under a different surname from the father's.

What we tested before writing this page

We ran real Galician Jewish register entries from Czortków, Byczkowce and Bochnia, dated between 1882 and 1906, through the same extraction every upload uses. Birth entries came back with the child, the parents, the other people named - the mother's parents on one, the godfather on another - and the circumcision recorded as its own dated event alongside the birth. A bilingual death entry, with headings in German and Polish and the entry itself in Polish, came back with the deceased and the mother named in it. One entry recorded as illegitimate came back with both the mother and the named father. That is a handful of entries, not an accuracy figure, and we are not claiming one.

From a scan to a connected profile

Reading the record is step one of four:

1. Upload the scan or photo.
2. Process it - KleioBase reads and translates the record and pulls out the people and events.
3. Review the result and fix anything the AI misread. Names spelled in Polish in one record and German in the next are where these registers get tricky.
4. Confirm it - KleioBase creates or updates person profiles and links the record to them.

Once confirmed, a child recorded under the mother's surname and married years later under the father's can become one profile, with both documents attached. As the archive grows, KleioBase suggests likely duplicate people to merge and points out where a generation is still missing.

Why Galician records are hard, and how the review step helps

The same person can appear as Mojżesz in a Polish entry and Moses in a German one, and a family's surname can differ between parents and children for the reason above. Towns have Polish, German, Yiddish and Ukrainian names. Deciding that two entries are the same person is the real research. Our guide to Austrian Galicia records covers where the registers are held and how to find the right one.

KleioBase gives you a first reading and then hands you the controls. You confirm what is right and correct what is not, and nothing enters your archive until you do.