Researching a village the internet forgot

2026-06-02 · ~11 min

There is a village north of Ramallah called Turmus Ayya. My family is from there. Wikipedia gives it a handful of paragraphs and the usual census stub. I wanted more — not for a paper, not for a project, just for myself. So I sat down one evening with a language model and asked it to help me dig.

What follows is the process, and a few of the things it turned up. The full report runs twenty-four pages. This is the part I think is worth writing down.

The first prompt

I told the model what village I was looking for, gave it three spelling variants, and added one clause that turned out to matter more than anything else in the rest of the conversation:

Even if it has information about other villages around that might reference it, or at least relatively or very closely mentions it.

That single instruction is what turned up Turbasaim — a Crusader-Latin form of the name that I had never seen in any modern source. Turbasaim doesn’t appear in Wikipedia. It doesn’t appear in the village’s own profile pages. It shows up in a nineteenth-century Palestine Exploration Fund nomenclature study that itself was reading twelfth-century church cartularies.

I asked the model where, exactly. It pointed me at Eugène de Rozière’s Cartulaire de l’église du Saint-Sépulcre de Jérusalem, published in 1849 from Vatican manuscripts, and at Reinhold Röhricht’s Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani, the master registry of Crusader-era charters. The entry is dated 14 August 1145. Patriarch William I of Jerusalem is settling a dispute between Pontius, abbot of Mount Tabor, and Peter, prior of the Holy Sepulchre. The patriarch awards Mount Tabor the church at casale Sancti Egidii — the village of St. Gilles, which is the next village over from mine, today called Sinjil — together with half the tithes of Turbasaim et Dere.

Half the tithes. That’s the thing that lodged in my head. The Crusader Latin doesn’t grant anyone the village. It grants half the income on agricultural produce from the village to the church next door. Eight hundred and eighty years ago, my grandparents’ village was an income stream in a dispute between two French monastic orders, written down in a manuscript that eventually ended up in the Vatican.

The name had been sitting in a footnote for a hundred and forty years.

What the research actually turned up

The model produced a 24-page comprehensive report. Here are the findings that surprised me most.

The 1145 grant has a sequel. Thirty years later, on 17 October 1175, the same two institutions met again. This time the Holy Sepulchre got the church back — along with the half-tithe rights to St. Gilles, Turbasaym, and Dere. The reciprocal act from Mount Tabor also mentions vineas vero et domos, “vineyards and houses,” sold for a sum in bezants. So the ecclesiastical presence was not just a fiscal abstraction. There were physical houses and vineyards owned by the Latin Church in or near my village in 1175.

The story doesn’t end with the Crusades. When Frankish power collapsed, the village did not vanish from the documentary record. It got picked up by the next regime. In 1268–69 CE (668 AH), the Mamluk sultan Baybars founded a waqf — an Islamic charitable endowment — for the shrine of Nabi Musa, near Jericho. The deed, edited by Kamil al-Asali, lists the villages whose revenues would support the shrine. One of them is written ترمسعيا — Turmusayya. Already, by 1268, the name is in recognizably modern Arabic form. So the documentary line for my village runs: 1145 Crusader Latin → 1175 Crusader Latin → 1268 Mamluk Arabic → 1596 Ottoman tax register → 1838 American missionary survey → 1882 British survey → 1922, 1931, 1945 British censuses → today. Across eight centuries, three empires, and three languages, the name moved from Turbasaim to Turmusayya to Turmus Ayya without ever breaking.

The “Dere” question. The 1145 and 1175 acts always pair Turbasaim with another place called Dere. Nobody knows for certain where Dere was. Conder, in the nineteenth century, proposed Deir es-Sudan, west of Sinjil. Twentieth-century scholarship moved the identification east, to Khirbet Deir el-Fikia / Ras ad-Deir, where Palestine Exploration Fund surveyors found “the ruins of a monastery and chapel” with masonry they identified as Crusader work. If that identification is right — and the consensus now leans that way — then the medieval landscape around my village included a small monastery whose stones are still on the ground. I had never heard of it.

The negative result on Tur Shimon. Some twentieth-century scholars proposed that Turmus Ayya was the ancient Tur Shimon mentioned in rabbinic sources, partly on the resemblance of the names. The Israeli archaeologist Boaz Zissu argued against that identification — not on philological grounds but on dirt. Surface survey at Turmus Ayya produced sherds from several periods but none from the Hellenistic period. If the village were Tur Shimon, you’d expect Hellenistic-era pottery. There isn’t any. That’s the kind of finding a casual search will never give you, because nobody writes a Wikipedia paragraph about an identification that didn’t hold up.

The sarcophagus. In 1912, a richly carved marble sarcophagus was discovered near the village. Jacob E. Spafford of the American Colony in Jerusalem described it the next year. German art-historical cataloging dates it to 240–250 CE and identifies the carving program as Bacchus and the genii of the seasons. So there was, in the Roman period, somebody important enough in the area to be buried in an imperial-quality sarcophagus carved with Dionysus. The model surfaced the German catalog entry, which an English-only search would never have found.

The diaspora is real but the number is folklore. Multiple journalistic sources describe Turmus Ayya as a town where more than 80 percent of residents hold U.S. citizenship, with secondary migration to Latin America — Panama in particular. The model initially repeated the 80 percent figure as fact. When I asked where the data came from, the honest answer was: no official source. It is a journalistic estimate that has self-replicated across dozens of news articles. The underlying pattern is well-documented: large diaspora, remittance-built villas, seasonal occupancy. The specific number is folklore that sounds like data.

The town is still being made and unmade. The model also surfaced something I knew but had not seen catalogued: the B’Tselem documentation of repeated settler attacks on Turmus Ayya in 2023, including arson against vehicles belonging to named members of the Abu ‘Awwad family — one of the village’s older lineages, attested in local material and continuous enough that the same family name shows up in modern human-rights litigation. The historical record for this village is not closed. It is being added to in real time, in a register very different from twelfth-century cartularies, but no less archival.

The matching problem

The reason a clause like “even something close” mattered: this is a place whose name has been written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Latinized Crusader French, nineteenth-century English, nineteenth-century German, and modern transliterations that don’t agree with each other. The British Mandate’s own census officials wrote in 1931 that the transliteration system they were using was already being abandoned, while the census was still going to press.

If you search for “Turmus Ayya” you find the modern village. If you search for “Turmus ‘Aiya” you find the 1931 census. If you search for “Tourmous’aya” you find a French art-history article about a Roman sarcophagus. If you search for “Turbasaim” you find a 1145 land grant. If you search for ترمسعيا you find a 1268 Islamic waqf.

These are all the same place. None of them link to each other.

What I learned about prompting

A few things crystallized over the course of the research that I want to remember.

Ask for the negative result. The single most valuable thing the model surfaced wasn’t a confirmation, it was a contradiction — the Zissu argument that the Tur Shimon identification doesn’t hold up. Negative findings clarify what the evidence actually supports. You have to ask for them directly.

Source classes matter more than source counts. I told the model to prioritize in roughly this order: official censuses, primary historical publications, explorer/survey literature, archaeology, and only then secondary compilations or local profiles. The reason is that local profiles tend to silently compress together primary facts, antiquarian conjectures, and oral etymologies. Without explicit ranking, the model treats them all as equally citeable. With ranking, it tells you when it’s reaching for the bottom of the stack.

Filter your false positives early. Two categories of garbage results plagued every search: there is another place called Tall al-Turmus in Gaza, which is not the same village; and turmus in Arabic also means lupini beans, which dominate the search results for anything resembling the name. Telling the model these two patterns existed before it started cut the noise in half.

Push deeper on the thread that surprises you. When Turbasaim came back, I didn’t move on to the next question. I spent the next several turns just on Crusader cartularies — which is how the 1175 follow-up, the Dere identification debate, and the Baybars waqf all surfaced. The diminishing returns on a single thread come much later than you expect.

Treat the variant table as a precondition. Every script, every spelling, every transliteration convention, before issuing a single search. Turbasaim, Turbasaym, Turbasym, Tourmous’aya, Turmus ‘Aiya, Turmus ‘Aya, ترمسعيا, Thormasia, Tur Shimon — list them all up front, decide which are evidentiary and which are conjectural, then go.

What it got wrong

It is not a perfect collaborator.

It conflated dates more than once. An English-language summary called the sarcophagus “2nd century B.C.”, and a separate German art-history catalog dated the same object to 240–250 CE. The model initially reported both as if they were consistent. I had to push it to flag the discrepancy. When I did, it correctly noted that one source was a popular retelling and the other was specialist cataloging — but it didn’t volunteer that distinction on its own.

It over-anchored on the most-cited claim. The 80 percent diaspora figure appears in dozens of journalistic sources. The model repeated it confidently several times before I asked where the underlying data came from. There is no underlying data. It is an estimate that has self-replicated.

It is bad at adjudicating what can’t be known. Some questions — the exact pre-Roman name of the site, the full hamula genealogy of the village’s families — have answers that simply don’t exist in any accessible archive. The model wants to give you an answer. You have to actively push back and ask it to enumerate the limits of the evidence, not just summarize the evidence.

It cannot, on its own, distinguish Turbasaim is securely attested in 1145 from Turbasaim is identified with modern Turmus Ayya by later scholarly inference. Those are two different epistemic claims. Holding them apart was one of the hardest parts of the conversation, and it required me — not the model — to keep reasserting the distinction.

What I’d do differently next time

Three things.

Start with the negative-result prompt earlier. Asking “what identifications for this place have failed, and why?” should be one of the first questions, not one of the last. It calibrates everything that follows.
Build the variant table before doing any searches. I had to back-fill it after I’d already done a lot of single-spelling searches. Future-me should treat the variant table as a precondition, not a deliverable.
Ask for the source class of every claim, every time. Not “is this true,” but “what kind of source is this.” Charter versus regesta versus survey versus secondary compilation versus folk etymology. The five categories require five different levels of trust, and the model will assign all five the same confidence if you don’t make it differentiate.

This is the first post on this blog. I want to write more like it — research notes, builds, things I’m working through. Mostly for future-me. The next one is probably about Obsidian, six years in.

If you have your own deep-research project — a hometown, a family name, an ancestor, a forgotten place — I’d encourage you to try this. The internet hasn’t forgotten the things you think it has. It has just filed them under names you don’t know yet. Mine was filed under Turbasaim in a Vatican manuscript and ترمسعيا in a Mamluk waqf, and it took the right kind of prompt to put them in the same place.