Search
From the Arabic name to its Latinised form
The same man may be called ʿĪsā in a judicial deed, Isa in a baptism register and Aisa under another scribe’s pen. This walkthrough shows how to find those forms without knowing them in advance.
Why spellings diverge
Latin parish registers are kept in Latin and Italian by clerics writing Arabic names by ear. Judicial deeds are written in Arabic by scribes trained in another tradition. The same name therefore crosses two writing systems, several languages of drafting and as many hands.
Scholarly transliteration usages, with their diacritics, add another layer in modern editions and catalogues. A search requiring the exact form fails on that difference in signs alone.
What the search does
Every spelling found in a source is indexed as written, then attached to a shared key obtained by removing diacritics, accents and the Arabic definite article. Searching one form therefore searches all the forms that share that key.
Nothing is rewritten in the data: the register’s form stays visible on each result, and the variant you came through is flagged. The match is a search path, never a correction of the source.
Three forms, one search
The three forms below belong to the published corpus. The figures shown are measured at build time on that corpus, not estimated. In scholarly transliteration, the diacritic form no longer differs from the plain Latin form once the key is computed: both lead to the same set of mentions.
Isa
688 results for "Isa", gathering 15 distinct spellings from the published corpus.
Aisa
1,466 results for "Aisa", gathering 8 distinct spellings from the published corpus.
ʿĪsā
688 results for "ʿĪsā", gathering 15 distinct spellings from the published corpus.
What the match does not do
Finding every spelling of a name does not mean it is one single person. Two mentions sharing a spelling remain two distinct mentions until an identity match has been examined and validated against the sources.
The search brings you to the material: it is then up to you to read the records and follow the kinship links, whose certainty is shown relation by relation.