Informatics (May 2023)

Genealogical Data Mining from Historical Archives: The Case of the Jewish Community in Pisa

  • Angelica Lo Duca,
  • Andrea Marchetti,
  • Manuela Moretti,
  • Francesca Diana,
  • Mafalda Toniazzi,
  • Andrea D’Errico

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics10020042
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 2
p. 42

Abstract

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The Jewish community archive in Pisa owns a vast collection of documents and manuscripts that date back centuries. These documents contain valuable genealogical information, including birth, marriage, and death records. This paper aims to describe the preliminary results of the Archivio Storico della Comunita Ebraica di Pisa (ASCEPI) project, with a focus on the extraction of data from the Nati, Morti e Ballottati (NMB) Registry document in the archive. The NMB Registry contains about 1900 records of births, deaths, and balloted individuals within the Jewish community in Pisa. The study uses a semiautomatic pipeline of digitization, transcription, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract personal data such as names, surnames, birth and death dates, and parental names from each record. The extracted data are then used to build a knowledge base and a genealogical tree for a representative family, Supino. This study demonstrates the potential of using NLP and rule-based techniques to extract valuable information from historical documents and to construct genealogical trees.

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