Read an emigrant’s letter home
Emigrants settling in America, Brazil, or the Russian steppes kept ties through long letters written in Kurrent or Cyrillic. Photograph your ancestor’s letter. FamilyLore transcribes the original phrasing line by line, translates it into modern English, and flags uncertain readings.
Your first three pages need no account and no card.
A pioneer letter from our shelf, as FamilyLore read it
A dotted underline marks a word FamilyLore was unsure of; [?] is its own note on a doubtful reading.
Johann Kilian to Gotthold Albert Gumlich · 20 May 1858
- Serbin (Low Pinoak Settlement) Bastrop County,
- Texas, den 20sten Mai 1858.
- Geliebter Bruder im Herrn!
- Den Empfang Deines lieben Schreibens vom 16ten März 1858
- bescheinige ich hiermit schon jetzt, weil ich den Andreas Kiesling[?]
- auf den Todtenschein für seine Eltern nicht zu lange warten
Also on the shelf: Explorer V. K. Arsenyev writing from Khabarovsk, 1910 · Kollwitz family correspondence, 1914
How well it reads, measured
| Script | Pages | Characters read correctly | Names, dates and numbers right | Misread words it marked | Last run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kurrent and Sütterlin15 pages · 3 Nov 2026 | 15 | 83%Characters read correctly | 75%Names, dates and numbers right | 85%Misread words it marked | 3 Nov 2026 |
| Russian and Ukrainian7 pages · 3 Nov 2026 | 7 | 86%Characters read correctly | 69%Names, dates and numbers right | 80%Misread words it marked | 3 Nov 2026 |
Measured on letters whose holders published a transcription made by hand, read the same way your page is. The figures rest on a few pages so far and move as pages are added. How well FamilyLore reads
Questions
- Can’t ChatGPT do this?
- A general chatbot can read some emigrant correspondence, sometimes well, but it usually hands you clean text with no sign of which words it guessed, and its makers publish no figures for these scripts; FamilyLore marks the words it is unsure of and publishes how often it reads correctly, in the table above.
- What if it reads a word wrong?
- Tap a word to see the other readings FamilyLore weighed, and correct it if you know better. The translation is redone from your correction. Most misread words carry a mark, but not every one, so a name or a date that matters is worth checking against the photo.
- Why do emigrant letters mix different alphabets?
- Writers frequently switched to Latin script for new American addresses, county names, and ship registries, while penning the main family narrative in traditional Kurrent or Cyrillic.
- Who sees my pages?
- Only you. A page becomes public only if you share it, and then only to people who have the link. Deleting your account deletes the photos you uploaded.
What FamilyLore doesn’t read well yet
- Ship passenger manifests and customs declarations formatted in wide tabular columns (unmeasured).
- Faded pencil cross-writing where lines were written perpendicular over existing text to save postage.
- Water-damaged letters and postal cancels stamped across crucial surnames.
From photo to text in three steps
Take a photo of the page
Lay the sheet flat, in daylight and without flash. A phone photo of the whole page is enough.
Upload it
“German (Kurrent)” is already chosen. If you know roughly when it was written, pick the era.
Read it
You get the page as it was written, in modern spelling, and in English. Correct a word you know better yourself.
Rather read it yourself?