Nowy Korczyn is a small town in southern Poland with a long Jewish history and very little left to show for it. What survives is paper: some 7,000 pages of handwritten Polish records spanning the late 18th century right up to the turn of the 20th.
I used Claude to translate those records, thousands of them, and I am reconstructing the town’s story from what they say: who lived where, who married whom, what was bought, sold, built and lost. The same records are redrawing its map, lot by lot, as a plan of the market square, the church, the streets running down to the river and the houses along them.
Why
It started as research about my family, who trace their roots to there, then morphed into a sprawling multigenerational saga.