Abstract

The source documentation comprising the so-called Szumska Archive is a collection of documents discovered during construction work carried out in 2021 in Tarnobrzeg, now deposited in the Museum – Tarnowski Castle in Tarnobrzeg. This documentation was created by activists of the Committee for the Eastern Borderlands, a clandestine organization established under the Main Board of the National Party with the goal of conducting political and social analyses and documenting human and material losses suffered by the Polish state in the Eastern Borderlands. The organizational structure included four regional committees responsible for various areas of the Eastern Borderlands. Activists from the documentation section of the Volhynia Committee, led by Urszula Szumska, collected during World War II an exceptionally valuable body of source material documenting the course of the Volhynian-Galician slaughter. The collection also includes numerous names – not only of victims, but also of witnesses and perpetrators. The documentation description schema developed by the Volhynia Committee departments constitutes an original record of the methodological search they conducted to organize the gathered documentation. They also undertook efforts to create tools for processing the information contained in the collected materials. To this end, they created various types of extract files, auxiliary lists, and indexes. These tools were intended to enable the compilation of different data summaries covering various aspects of the Volhynian crime. This article presents the editorial work carried out on the Szumska Archive, focusing on attempts to understand the goals and methodological principles guiding the activists of the Volhynia Committee in developing algorithms that would allow this documentation to be presented in the form of relational databases.