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The National Archives is seeking volunteers who can read cursive to help transcribe more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog, saying the skill is a “superpower.”
The penmanship style has become almost obsolete as typing and texting take over.
Most American schools no longer teach the handwriting form, instead focusing on keyboard skills.
Currently, 24 states require cursive to be taught — but that alone may not help with the National Archives task at hand.
“It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, DC, told USA TODAY.
“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Isaacs explained, saying there are more than 200 years worth of documents to get through.
The organization has registered over 5,000 Citizen Archivists but could still use more help.
“There’s no application,” Isaacs said. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”
The records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the 1950 Census.
Volunteer Christine Ritter, 70, who lives in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania is currently deciphering Revolutionary War pension files for soldiers who served at the Battle of Guildford Courthouse on March 15, 1781.
She takes great pride in her work thinking of how people will feel being able to discover these artifacts and connect them to their family histories.
“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 told USA TODAY.
“I just love it so much.”
