Being able to read the longhand script is a huge help because so many of the documents are written using it.
“It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” she said.
Cursive has fallen out of use
American’s skill with this connected form of script has been slowly waning for decades.
School children were once taught impeccable copperplate handwriting and penmanship was something they were graded on.
That began to change when typewriters first came into common use in the business world in the 1890s and was further supplanted in the 1980s by computers.
Still, handwriting continued to be considered a necessary skill until the 1990s when many people shifted to e-mail and then in the 2000s to texting.
By 2010, the Common Core teaching standards emphasized keyboard skills (once taught as “typewriting”) and no longer required handwriting on the presumption that most of the writing students would do would be on computers.
That led to a pushback and today at least 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught, including California in 2023. But it doesn’t mean that they actual use it in real life.
In the past, most American students began learning to write in cursive in third grade, making it a rite of passage, said Jaime Cantrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University Texarkana whose students take part in the Citizen Archivist work, putting their skills reading old documents to work.
For her generation, “cursive was a coming-of-age part of literacy in the 1980s. We learned cursive and then we could write like adults wrote,” she said.
While many of her students today learned cursive in school, they never use it and seldom read it, she said. She can tell because she writes feedback on their papers in cursive.
Some of her students aren’t even typing any more. Instead, they’re just using talk-to-text technology or even AI. “I know that because there’s no punctuation, it reads like a stream of consciousness.”
It’s an uphill – but by no means impossible – battle to become comfortable with reading and writing the cojoined script. And it opens up access to a wealth of older documents.
Cursive is still a skill for some
California passed a law in 2023 requiring that “cursive or joined italics” be taught for grades one through six. The law’s author said it was so students could read primary source historical documents.
That’s exactly how Cantrell’s students use it. One of the classes she teaches involves deciphering documents written in the 18th and 19th centuries – and one of their projects is to get involved in the National Archive’s transcription work.
“There is certainly a learning curve,” said Cantrell. “But my students stick it out. They feel like they have a duty, they feel like they’re making a difference.”
Being able to read cursive is just the start to deciphering older documents, said the National Archive’s Nancy Sullivan. The handwriting of the 18th and 19th centuries isn’t what today’s third-grader are taught.
Though sometimes the oldest writing is the easiest to read, said Cantrell.
“If you look at Abigail Adams letters to her husband (President John Adams) and his responses, the cursive is an art form, it’s so uniform,” she said.
Artificial intelligence can only go so far with cursive
Artificial intelligence is starting to be able to read cursive but only with human help, said the National Archive’s Sullivan.
The Archives has been working with FamilySearch, a genealogical non-profit operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that offers free genealogical software, searching and access to historical documents.
FamilySearch developed an AI program that reads handwritten documents. But a person is still required to do the final edit.
“There’s usually some mistakes,” she said. “So we call it ‘extracted text’ and our volunteers have to look it over and compare it to the original.” Only once a volunteer has looked the document over is it considered an actual transcription.
And AI can’t always decipher the often problematic documents their volunteers deal with, said Issacs. Sometimes they’ve been torn, smudged, folded or dog-eared. In the case of Revolutionary War pension applications, widows had to prove they were married so they often included handwritten family tree pages torn from the family Bible.
Not to mention simple poor penmanship. “Some of the Justices of the Peace, their handwriting is atrocious,” said volunteer Christine Ritter, 70, who lives in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania.
There are cross outs, things written on the other side that bleed through, strange and inventive spellings, old forms of letters (a double S was sometimes written as a “long s” and looked like an F) and even children’s doodles over top. And many obsolete terms and legal words that can flummox even the most erudite readers.
“It feels like solving a puzzle. I really enjoy it,” said volunteer Tiffany Meeks, 37. She started volunteering as a transcriber in June and learned a new word – paleography, deciphering historical manuscripts.
“I felt like I was learning a different language. Not only was I brushing up on my cursive, but my old English as well,” she said. “I learned a new word; paleography,” which is the deciphering of historical documents.
No cursive? No problem
The Archive’s Issacs is clear that volunteers don’t have to start out knowing cursive, you can learn along the way. “It helps – but it’s not necessary.”
For example, there’s a “no cursive required” option for those reading Revolutionary War pension records. Instead of reading and transcribing the records, volunteers can also help append “tags” to records that have already been transcribed by other Citizen Archivists so that they’re easier to search.
You can also pick it up as you go along, said Ritter.
“When they first sent me a document I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t read this. I got nervous. But the longer you do them the easier it gets,” she said.
Ritter’s working on Revolutionary War pension files for soldiers who served at the Battle of Guildford Courthouse on March 15, 1781. As she works, she imagines how much it will mean to families to find something so old about one of their relatives.
She says she once prided herself on her perfect penmanship but today says her handwriting is “atrocious.” Still, she can read cursive with the best of them and it’s become a wonderful hobby.
“I wake up in the morning and have my breakfast with my husband, then he goes off to go fishing and I come in my work room, I have my computer and I put on my radio station with oldies and I just start transcribing,” she said. “I just love it so much.”