On the occasion of America’s quarter millennium, the National Archives has launched a project inviting volunteers to help transcribe and digitize historical documents written in cursive.
The Archives contains millions of documents that have never been transcribed into modern typeface. Written in longhand, many Americans today might have trouble reading them since cursive has fallen out of favor as a topic in schools.
Called the Citizen Archivist project, one of the big goals is to transcribe and digitize a collection of handwritten documents pertaining to the pensions earned by soldiers during the Revolutionary War.
The Revolutionary War Pension Project is a collaborative effort between the National Park Service and the Archives to transcribe more than 2.3 million pages of pension files from the nation’s first veterans and their widows.
At first, pensions were only available for Continental Army soldiers who served under George Washington. Later acts opened pensions to those who served in militias and to widows. Each document is a gateway in time that allows us to peer into the lives of these founding fighters.
To date, more than 4,000 Revolutionary War Pension Project volunteers have typed up the content of over 80,000 pages of pension files, with upwards of 2,300 records completely transcribed.
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All you have to do to contribute to the project is visit the Citizen Archivist project website and sign up. Once you sign up, just pick a document that hasn’t been transcribed, and follow the Archives’ instructions.
One can select a document in the ‘missions‘ section on the website, which features Archive collections that are yet to be digitized. Available are the Revolutionary War pensions, a legal case involving the Choctaw nation, submarine patrol reports in WWII, and others.
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Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine details how cursive is regaining its place as a mandatory instruction in American schools after a period of decline that saw it replaced by typing skills.
States such as Kentucky and California have passed laws mandating that cursive should be part of the English school curriculum.
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