Across the Archive and the Atlantic: Reconstructing Jewish and Converso Kinship Networks with LLMs

Drawing on ongoing research with the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society, this paper explores how large language models can assist in reconstructing Jewish and converso kinship networks connecting Iberia, Spanish Florida, Mexico City, and the Caribbean during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Military musters, inquisitorial proceedings, wills, and genealogical inquiries provide the basis for investigating relationships sustained through marriage, patronage, and officeholding. LLM-assisted transcription, translation, and comparison help identify possible connections across dispersed records, which require verification against original manuscripts. The inquiry distinguishes documented kinship from plausible association, and Jewish ancestry from religious practice or accusation.

Collaboration between historians and volunteer researchers grounds these methods in shared questions of belonging and historical memory. The paper considers how AI can support historical inquiry while preserving uncertainty and the complexity of lives shaped by migration, conversion, and colonization.