Transcribe Old Letters and Family Papers
Wartime correspondence, grandparents’ postcards, estate papers — turn a shoebox of letters into a searchable family archive. The transcription keeps every line tied to the original handwriting, so nothing is ever “lost in translation.”
How it works
- 1
Photograph each letter (phone photos are fine) and drop the whole folder in.
- 2
Handwriting OCR transcribes page by page; hard-to-read words are flagged with a snippet of the original ink.
- 3
Confirm or correct the flagged words — often the only person who can read Grandpa’s r’s is you — then export searchable PDFs or text.
Why OhMyOCR
Old cursive, old ink, old paper
Faded ink and yellowed paper lower OCR confidence — and that is exactly what the flags are for. You review the genuinely hard words, not the whole letter.
Your reading, preserved
When you correct a word, the correction is remembered and applied to exports. The same misread name flags once, not fifty times — the dictionary learns your family’s handwriting.
An archive, not a pile of files
Every letter stays searchable in your account: find “Normandy” or a family name across hundreds of pages in seconds, corrections included.
Searchable PDF keepsakes
Export two-layer PDFs — the original letter images with invisible searchable text — perfect for sharing with relatives or depositing with a historical society.
Reading the unreadable: how flags rescue old correspondence
Old letters are the hardest OCR input there is: spidery cursive, crossed lines, faded iron-gall ink, foxed paper. No engine transcribes them perfectly, and services that pretend otherwise deliver transcripts with confident-sounding fiction exactly where the handwriting was hardest. For family history, that failure mode is poisonous — a misread name or date propagates into trees and records.
The flag-and-verify workflow is built for this material. The engine transcribes what it can read and flags what it cannot, each flag paired with a snippet of the original ink. Family members are often the only people alive who can resolve those words — and once you correct “Wm.” to “William” or fix the family farm’s name, the correction dictionary applies your reading as a suggestion every time the same scrawl reappears.
Building an archive relatives can actually use
A shoebox of letters becomes three things: a searchable private archive (find every mention of a name across hundreds of pages, corrections included); two-layer searchable PDFs that show the original handwriting but search as text — ideal for sharing with relatives or depositing with a historical society; and clean transcripts in TXT or Markdown for genealogy software.
Practical notes: photograph one page per shot under even light; batches of a few hundred pages queue automatically; and the one-time pages pack covers a family-archive project without a subscription.
Frequently asked questions
Can it read 19th-century or early 20th-century handwriting?
Legible cursive generally transcribes well; ornate or damaged writing produces more flagged words. The workflow is designed for that: OCR does the bulk, you resolve the flagged words against the original strokes.
What if a word is genuinely illegible?
Confirm your best reading or leave the flag standing — flags are visible in the workspace, so “uncertain” stays honestly marked instead of becoming silent fiction in the transcript.
How should I photograph fragile letters?
Lay them flat under even light, one page per shot, and include the whole page in frame. Do not force creased letters flat — slight curvature is handled fine.
Can I share the results with family?
Yes — export searchable PDFs (the letter images with a text layer) or plain text/Markdown transcripts and share them like any file.
How much does a shoebox of letters cost to digitize?
A one-time pages pack is $15 for 100 credits and does not require a subscription. Free monthly credits let you test a few letters before committing.
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Try it on your own file
Free to start, no credit card, results you can verify line by line.
Get started — free