Ancestry's NEW Handwriting Recognition & Transcription Tool

News from "Business Partner" National Genealogical Society (NGS)

Ol’ Myrt here was surprised to receive the announcement from the National Genealogical Society rather than Ancestry .com itself. I can only hope the use of NGS’s email list for advertising will keep our annual NGS dues stable.

The Process

Basically, you take a .jpg or .png of a handwritten document and upload it to your gallery at Ancestry. Caution: Be sure you did not download the image from a website with a TOS (Term of Service) requirement to keep the document for your personal use, including not uploading it to another website.

Thanks to Connie Knox for this demonstration the steps she took to upload a document to her Memories>Gallery and complete the process for identifying the document date, location, and ancestor.

This handwriting recognition and transcription service is available to Ancestry subscribers at the World Explorer level and higher.

Unlike Full Text Search at FamilySearch.org

Ancestry’s handwriting recognition requires you to first provide an individual document to Ancestry before it reads and provides a transcript. By contrast, FamilySearch provides large data sets of digital imaged record sets and permits you to search handwritten documents and typed text for a specific name or phrase.

Summary

Agreeing with Connie, I’d say this is a wonderful AI tool available for use within the environment of Ancestry.com. In other words, you don’t need an advanced degree in the use of AI to go searching here and there throughout the web for other AI services that have been reading old handwriting and providing a typed transcript for quite some time now.

We do get by with a little help from our friends. Myrt suggests subscribing to GenealogyTV and supporting Connie’s insightful work.

Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt
DearMYRTLE,
Your (not so) retired friend in genealogy.

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