Transkribus or FamilyLore for family letters
Transkribus is a platform from READ-COOP. FamilyLore is built for family historians with old letters: photograph a page in German, Russian, or Hebrew script, get a transcription with marked doubtful words, and an English translation alongside it.
Your first three pages need no account and no card.
A shelf letter with transcription and translation
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: V. K. Arsenyev’s 1910 letter in Russian cursive
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 |
FamilyLore publishes character accuracy and doubt recall on hand-transcribed benchmark letters. How well FamilyLore reads
Questions
- Can’t ChatGPT do this?
- A general chatbot can read some old handwriting, 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.
- How does FamilyLore differ from Transkribus?
- Transkribus is developed by READ-COOP. FamilyLore is made for family historians with individual letters: upload a family letter to get an immediate transcription and an English translation with word-level doubt marks, with no model training required.
- 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.
- 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
- Custom AI model training for large archival collections. FamilyLore uses pre-trained models rather than user-trained models.
- Tabular registers and census books set out in columns. These are not measured yet.
- Faded pages, which are measured on only a few benchmark pages so far.
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?