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Nyshporka

Nyshporka with a magnifying glass

Reads the manuscript. Brings back what it finds.

Nyshporka helps you look for your ancestors in archival documents — parish registers, confession lists, revision lists of the 18th–19th centuries. But it does not work like an ordinary program.

The assistant does the work, you decide

A genealogist looks over a folio her Nyshporka assistant has brought her

An assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT can be allowed to work on your computer: open folders, run programs, save the results — and ask your permission every time. An assistant like this is called an agent.

Nyshporka is made precisely for it. You write in plain words: “here is a folder of scans of the Chechelnyk parish registers — find all the Kovalskyis”. The assistant reads the handwritten folios, looks for the surname and brings back the lines it has found right on the scan, with the folio number.

Whether this is your family is for you to decide. In the same way, you decide what to order from the archive and whether to share what has been read. The assistant shows; it does not draw conclusions for you.

Video lessons

A series of short video lessons — from installation to your first find and a family tree with evidence, 5–9 minutes each. New lessons keep coming. The lessons are in Ukrainian, with subtitles YouTube can translate into your language.

Watch it live

Nyshporka is shown at work in the stream “ШІ-агенти в генеалогії: дослідження майбутнього” (“AI agents in genealogy: researching the future”, “В гостях у Качки” No. 11) — the demonstration starts at about minute 42.

What Nyshporka gives the assistant

On its own, the assistant knows nothing about archives and cannot read an old manuscript. Nyshporka gives it:

  • knowledge of where things are — archive guides, fond inventories, lists of villages and parishes;
  • the ability to read manuscripts — three reading models trained on Ukrainian, Moldovan and Polish archives: Pysar and Diak read Cyrillic, Skryba reads Latin script;
  • memory — what has already been looked through and found, so that the same folios are not leafed through twice;
  • rules of honest work — “not found” always comes with an explanation of how many folios were looked through.

Why this is a different approach

An ordinary program can do exactly what was built into it: as many buttons, as many possibilities. Nyshporka gives the assistant separate skills — find a file, read a folio, find a surname, record a discovery — and the assistant combines them into what your particular question needs: “make a table of all the marriages in this village in the 1820s”, even though nobody ever made a separate button for that. And the cleverer assistants become, the more Nyshporka can do — even without an update.

What you need

  • A computer with Windows, macOS or Linux and about 5 GB of free space.
  • Nyshporka itself — free and open source.
  • An assistant that can work on a computer: Claude Desktop (a Claude Pro or Max subscription), Claude Code or Codex (a ChatGPT subscription).

All of this installs in half an hour, without typing a single command — “Install and connect an assistant”. The assistant will install the reading models itself: these are two one-off steps, nysh htr install and nysh models get.

Your scans go nowhere — everything runs on your computer. There is no telemetry and no accounts.

Status: early version

The catalogues, manuscript reading, surname search, record-keeping and the browser app all work. What is still missing is listed in the frequently asked questions, with nothing left unsaid.

Words you will meet here

word what it is
assistant (agent) an AI assistant — Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Codex — that is allowed to work on your computer
reading models Pysar, Diak and Skryba — they turn a handwritten folio into text
read text what the model has read from a folio. It contains mistakes: you search in it, and look at what you find on the scan
file an archival storage unit with a reference code, e.g. ДАХмО 315-1-8433; in Nyshporka, one folder of scans
folio · frame a page of the file · a single image (scan)
imaging the set of scans of one file — your own, bought, or from an archive's website
working folder Nyshporka's folder, by default Документи\Нишпорка (Documents\Nyshporka): this is where your research lives. In commands it is called the “workspace”
app Nyshporka's window in the browser — for seeing what has been found and leafing through the scans and the read text
skills ready-made working routines for the assistant: how to read a file, how to search for a surname, where to dig next
Supriaha a shared bank of files already read, at nyshporka.online/supriaha: what one person has read does not need to be read again

Where next