Transcribe Old Letters and Family Papers
Transcribe old letters and the shoebox becomes an archive you can search. Wartime letters, postcards, estate papers — photograph each page and it comes back as searchable text, every line pinned to the original ink. Hard-to-read words get flagged for you to confirm.
How it works
- 1
Photograph each letter with your phone — one page per shot — and drop the whole folder in.
- 2
OCR transcribes the pages in order; words it can't be sure of come back flagged with a snippet of the original ink.
- 3
Confirm or correct the flagged words — for the hardest letters, you may be the only person who can — then export searchable PDFs or plain text.
Why OhMyOCR
Built for faded, yellowed pages
Faded ink and yellowed paper push OCR confidence down — that is exactly what the flags are for. You review only the words that defeated the machine, not the whole letter.
Your reading, preserved
Correct a word and the fix sticks: it's applied to exports and suggested the next time the same scrawl appears, so a misread name flags once across the stack, not fifty times.
An archive, not a pile of files
Every letter stays searchable in your account. Search a family name or a place across hundreds of pages and get hits in seconds — corrections included.
Searchable PDF keepsakes
Export two-layer PDFs — the original letter images with an invisible text layer underneath — ready to share with relatives or deposit with a historical society.
Reading the unreadable: how flags rescue old correspondence
Somewhere in the house there's a shoebox of letters nobody has fully read in fifty years. That's the honest starting point: spidery cursive, crossed-out lines and faded ink will defeat any OCR engine, and the tools that pretend otherwise hand you a transcript that reads fine and is quietly wrong where the writing was hardest. For family history that is the expensive kind of wrong — a misread name or date gets copied into the family tree and stays there.
The flag-and-verify workflow exists for that. The engine transcribes what it can read and flags the rest, each flag paired with a snippet of the original ink, so you resolve only the words it couldn't. Often the only people who can are family. Correct “Wm.” to “William” once and the fix is remembered; when the same scrawl reappears, your reading comes back as the suggestion.
Building an archive relatives can actually use
A shoebox of letters ends up as three things. A private archive you can search — type a name and get every mention across hundreds of pages, corrections included. Two-layer PDFs that show the original handwriting but search as text, ready to share with relatives or deposit with a historical society. And plain transcripts in TXT or Markdown that import into genealogy software.
Practical notes: photograph one page per shot under even light, and batches of a few hundred pages queue on their own. The one-time pages pack covers a family archive without a subscription.
Frequently asked questions
Can it read 19th-century or early 20th-century handwriting?
Legible cursive generally comes through; ornate or damaged writing produces more flagged words. The workflow assumes that: OCR handles the bulk, and you resolve the flags against the original strokes.
What if a word is genuinely illegible?
Confirm your best reading or leave the flag standing. The workspace shows the uncertainty either way, so the transcript never silently invents a word.
How should I photograph fragile letters?
Lay them flat under even light, one page per shot, the whole page in frame. Don't force a creased letter flat — slight curvature is fine and safer for the paper.
Can I share the results with family?
Yes. Export the searchable PDFs or plain text transcripts and share them like any file — email, cloud drive, print.
How much does a shoebox of letters cost to digitize?
A one-time pages pack is $15 for 100 credits, no subscription needed. Free monthly credits cover testing on a few letters first.
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Try it on your own file
Free to start, no credit card, results you can verify line by line.
Get started — free