Zhnivo

Zhnivo (zhnivo.com) is a Belarusian non-profit project preserving genealogical information and the archival heritage of Belarus.

We digitise old books and documents: parish registers, censuses, memorial books, archive files and newspapers, including records from our own expeditions to churches, museums, libraries and private collections. From the scans we extract people, places and the historical administrative divisions of Belarus, and make them searchable, so anyone can find their ancestors by surname or village.

We process both handwritten and printed documents in Russian (modern and pre-revolutionary spelling), Belarusian, Polish, German, Latin and Lithuanian.

How it all works, from scan to searchable record: our workflow.

What we publish here

• Models for processing scans of historical documents: page and text-line classification, spread splitting
• Datasets built from historical Belarusian sources

Get in touch

We welcome any help and collaboration. We are especially interested in models, datasets and research related to the Belarusian language, culture, history and historical heritage of Belarus, as well as solutions for handwritten text recognition.

Contact: zhnivo.com/en/contact