IT and Society: Service that will allow Moscow residents to find information about their ancestors to be launched in Moscow

A new online-service that can recognize handwritten texts of archival documents will soon be launched in Moscow. The platform is necessary for searching information about residents of Moscow and Moscow Governorate until 1917, as stated by Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin.

The creators of the project are the Government of Moscow and the Yandex Company.

According to the mayor, in pre-revolutionary times the functions of modern registry offices have been performed by religious organizations: “In recent years, Glavarkhiv of Moscow has been conducting systematic work on the digitization of registers – data on birth, marriage and death of residents of Moscow and Moscow Governorate of the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Muslim and Jewish religions”.

The new platform for recognizing handwritten texts of archival documents will greatly ease the work of the “My Family” service launched earlier. “Neuronet, operating on the basis of AI technologies, will convert archival documents to machine-readable format, – Sergey Sobyanin wrote. – Before, it took numerous hours to obtain these documents manually, but the new platform can do it in a few minutes. In addition, the occurrence of errors is practically impossible”.