An app, coming soon

Balagula

One search hub for the digital archives, with AI to help you read and translate what you find. Built on the Engineering Remembrance Method.

A balagula, in Yiddish, was a wagon driver: the man who knew every road between the villages. Helen’s father and her cousins were wagon drivers. This app is named for them, and for the job it does: it knows the roads to the archives, and it takes you there.

It works like the wheel in my logo. Balagula is the hub, every archive is a spoke, and it all connects.

What it does

1. You give it a name and a town.
2. It tells you which archives to search, in what order, and takes you straight to each one.
3. It checks off what you find: every spelling of the name, birth dates, places.
4. It helps you read what you find. AI translates the record and reads the handwriting, and you check it against the original.
5. It runs inside your own Claude app, so your searches and finds stay in your own account, not with us. Balagula itself stores nothing about your family.
6. It sends you to each archive’s own search, the way each archive allows. It never copies their records.

Balagula finds the leads. Only you confirm them, against the original record.

It won’t hand you a family tree. No honest tool can, for these records. It shows you where to look, and how to know when you’ve found them.

Who is building it

My husband, Jake Grajewski, a software engineer, is building Balagula on the Engineering Remembrance Method: the same four steps I used to find Helen’s family. It starts with the first hour of a search, the part where most people don’t know where to begin. The method itself is free, and always will be.

Be the first to try it

Coming soon

Want to try it before anyone else? Write to me and I’ll tell you when it’s ready.

Until then, the free method walks you through the same steps by hand, and the databases list every archive I used.