Raise your hand if you’re one of the remaining few who can still read cursive! It’s a dying art in the age of the keyboard, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) needs you now more than ever to put those skills to the test as a volunteer citizen archivist.
Ahead of the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, NARA and the National Parks Service are calling on all cursive readers to help decipher and transcribe countless handwritten government documents in its archives.
“We really hope to bring to light these stories of America’s first veterans, who interrupted their lives and went off and fought,” Nancy Sullivan and Suzanne Isaacs, community managers for the National Archives Catalog, said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. “They had no idea what the impact of what they were doing would be, or that their stories would be digitized and made accessible to people around the world.”
Isaacs and Sullivan help coordinate over 5,000 citizen archivists working to transcribe over 300 million digitized documents in the catalog. Isaacs clarified in an interview with USAToday that there’s no application process — one just has to make an account and start selecting from a bevy of documents that have yet to be transcribed or classified.
Hundreds of thousands of stories, historical records, personal accounts, and even moments of tenderness that were quickly inscribed in inky script are waiting to be transcribed for accessibility. Beyond the current project, which is focused on Revolutionary-Era documents, volunteers can also help transcribe more modern texts in cursive, such as listed names from the 1950 census.
In an email to Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for NARA said that just this month, one volunteer deciphered the following poem from a Revolutionary War pension application file for veteran William Elmore of North Carolina:
I thank you for the cherries Madam
They ‘r the best in all the town;
I’d thank you more for your daughter though,
Whose name is Catherine Brown.
At the moment, artificial intelligence isn’t up to speed on deciphering 18th- and 19th-century handwritten script without human assistance, Sullivan explained. Tattered, dog-eared, smudged, water-damaged, and faded documents tend to throw AI readers for a loop, like that of the genealogical nonprofit FamilySearch that has partnered with NARA.
“There’s usually some mistakes,” Sullivan said of the FamilySearch software’s draft transcriptions. “So we call it ‘extracted text’ and our volunteers have to look it over and compare it to the original.”
Isaacs stressed that while it’s very helpful, the ability to read cursive isn’t required to become a volunteer citizen archivist — and many volunteers pick it up along the way.
If you’d like to volunteer your time and deciphering abilities, you can make an account and get started here.
Finally, my Catholic school experience paid off for something …
