The National Archives Is Looking for Volunteers With a “Superpower”: Reading Cursive

One consequence of our digital age is a decline in cursive, the flowing style of penmanship once considered a common skill. While plenty of people still sign their name in cursive, being able to read or write it is a different story. If you’re one of the dwindling number who can decipher this type of writing, the National Archives is hoping you have some free time—or a lot of it—to volunteer your skills.

In collaboration with the National Park Service, the document hub recently launched a Citizen Archivists project that involves transcribing paperwork from veterans of the Revolutionary War. The roughly 80,000 files comprising 2.3 million pages, which date between 1800 and 1912, involve pension and bounty land warrant claims. Much of it is likely being excavated for the first time.

“The pension applications hold detailed and diverse first-hand accounts of the Revolutionary War, from boasts of celebrity encounters with the likes of Washington and the French commander Lafayette to somber accounts of burying the dead after a battle,” the NPS said in a statement. “The files also contain valuable social history details about veterans and their families, such as rank, dates of birth, family composition, and property ownership. Each document yet to be transcribed remains an untold story of the revolution.”

The correspondences offer a trove of detail about Revolutionary War veterans, who often had to include personal information in their pension or land claims. Genealogical Information about marriages, deaths, households, and property is also part of the collection—though many details are obscured by the penmanship that was common at the time.

“Reading cursive is a superpower,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C., told USA Today. “It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today.”

Cursive was once taught and even graded in schools. Come the 1980s and 1990s, when computer classes were popularized, students began learning it in a mostly perfunctory way. While it’s still taught in some states, skills for writing and reading it often fall by the wayside as kids and teens turn to keyboards or smartphones for typing.

That’s not to say cursive is nearing obsolescence. In 2019, Texas joined several states in mandating cursive instruction in classrooms. Advocates point to cursive as being an exercise in fine motor skill that forces students to slow down and consider their work more carefully and that it should remain part of school curriculums.

Technology may be to blame for the erosion of cursive skills, but can it help with reading digitized documents? Not just yet. According to USA Today, AI tools run into problems when handwritten pages have margin notes, crossed-out words, or ink that bleeds through the other side of the page. Writing that can be “read” by AI often needs to have a set of human eyes review it.

Interested parties can sign up for a National Archives account and watch an introductory video to get started. If you can’t read cursive but still want to help, the Archives is also looking for amateur archivists to tag documents to make searching easier.

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