More and more records are being digitized and made available online now than ever before. Many organizations are digitizing records, and then crowdsourcing the transcription and indexing to regular people like us. Together, we can help make those records searchable and findable for everyone.

Here are a few projects you can work on with fellow genealogists or even just at home in your bunny slippers.

Help transcribe military pension files from the Revolutionary War!

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the National Archives and the National Park Service are collaborating on a special project to transcribe Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, ca. 1800 – ca. 1912. These Revolutionary War Pension Files consist of applications and other records pertaining to claims for pensions and bounty land warrants. https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/missions/revolutionary-war-pension-files

Some resources for reading handwriting:

Staff from the Library of Virginia recorded an hour-long presentation about reading old handwriting with lots of tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utZN0E4h0sw

The State Archives of North Carolina has put together some resources to help with reading old handwriting: https://archives.ncdcr.gov/researchers/transcribenc/transcribenc-handwriting-resources

From the Georgia Archives: https://www.georgiaarchives.org/online_exhibits/handwriting

Legacy Tree Genealogists have a blog post, “5 Tips for Deciphering Old Handwriting”: https://www.legacytree.com/blog/five-tips-deciphering-old-handwriting

FamilySearch’s “Handwriting Helps” guide: https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/help/handwriting

FromThePage’s list of helpful books: https://content.fromthepage.com/handwriting_how_to/

Transcription Projects you can join:

Making History: Transcribe – various historic documents from the Library of Virginia
https://www.virginiamemory.com/transcribe/

Virginia Chronicle from the Library of Virginia is a historical archive of Virginia newspapers, and it is digitized and searchable. The newspapers were made searchable by software, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This software does an amazing job of reading the digital copies of the newspapers and turning them into searchable text, but it does get things wrong. Virginia Chronicle invites us to correct the OCR errors. Explore Virginia Chronicle‘s collection, pick a paper and an issue, and correct the text so that you and your fellow researchers will better be able to find information.
https://virginiachronicle.com/

University of Virginia Law Library
Collections available for transcription include personal papers, diaries, letters, manuscripts, legal documents from early America, and more.
https://fromthepage.com/uvalawlibrary

FamilySearch has digitized a lot more records than are currently searchable in its indexes. Help do some of that indexing! Choose a Virginia project, or from any other state, or country! Learn more at https://www.familysearch.org/getinvolved/ and then click the Indexing tab.

Transcribe NC
Similar to the Library of Virginia’s Making History: Transcribe projects, North Carolina also offers multiple opportunities for people to help transcribe records, diaries, letters, and more. https://archives.ncdcr.gov/researchers/transcribenc

The National Archives has a Citizen Archivist program, allowing us to contribute to the National Archives Catalog by tagging, transcribing, and adding comments to their records, making them more accessible and searchable. See https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist

The Library of Congress also has a “By the People” project where we can transcribe, tag, or review some of their digitized documents, such as personal papers, letters, diaries, and more. See https://crowd.loc.gov/ to register and https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns-topics/ for a list of projects.

The Smithsonian has several projects for which it is using crowdsourcing to help improve record availability. There are projects from a variety of Smithsonian museums and archives, including the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and more! https://transcription.si.edu/

From the Page
From the Page is one of the software platforms for crowdsourcing transcriptions. They have a list of projects their customers are working on where you can help. Some are not genealogical in nature, but some are, such as the Nineteenth Century Digital Cooperative, hosted by the Kentucky Historical Society. See https://fromthepage.com/findaproject for a list of From the Page projects, or https://fromthepage.com/ncdc for more about the NCDC.

Veridian
Similar to the From the Page software, Veridian Software is another software platform for crowdsourcing transcriptions. See https://veridiansoftware.com/collections/ for a list of projects including newspapers, libraries, historical societies, and more!

Here is another blog post from the American Historical Association about crowd transcription projects: https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-with-dighist/crowd-transcription-projects-resource

Have a favorite transcription project not listed above? Let us know and we’ll add it to the list!