u/gen-art — reddlx

Has anyone found reliable AI tools for transcribing old handwritten documents?

I've been researching family history for 25 years and the documents that always defeated me were the handwritten ones — 19th century parish registers, Latin baptismal records, German church records that I simply couldn’t read.

I’ve been experimenting with using AI specifically trained on historical handwriting styles — secretary hand, court hand, the letter forms that look nothing like modern writing — and the results have been genuinely useful for genealogical documents.

The thing that matters most for this kind of work is that it flags what it can’t read rather than guessing. A wrong name or date in a family record breaks everything downstream.

Curious what others have found works well — particularly for non-English documents. Latin and French records have been my main challenge.

reddit.com

u/gen-art — 3 days ago

▲ 3 r/AIGenealogy

After 25 years of genealogy research I finally built the tools I always wanted

I’ve been researching my family history for over 25 years. In that time I built several genealogy and local history websites — including one covering a group of parishes in the English Midlands, with tens of thousands of records going back five centuries.

But something always frustrated me. All that research — thousands of people, hundreds of places, centuries of history — and the only way to experience it was sitting at a desk, looking at a screen. I knew where my ancestors had lived, worked, and died. I just never felt it.

So I spent the past year building a suite of mobile apps to change that.

Heritage Compass imports your GEDCOM and maps every recorded location in your family tree. Then, wherever you go in the world, it watches quietly. When you’re near any place connected to your ancestors, it speaks to you. Yes, speaks. — a personal narrative drawn directly from your own data:

“You’re passing St Mary’s Church. Your great-great-grandmother was baptised here in 1847. Your great-grandparents were married here in 1871. This place witnessed three moments in your family’s history.”

That’s just the start. Heritage Journal — currently in Apple App Store review, expected within days — uses Claude’s vision AI to transcribe and translate historical documents, attaching them directly to the people and places in your family tree through a shared database. Latin, French, Danish, German, Gaelic — whatever the document is written in, it transcribes and translates it while always preserving the original text.

And beyond that, Heritage Connections, Heritage Traces, Heritage Chronicles, and Heritage Places are all in development — each adding a new layer, all sharing the same data.

I’ve been reading the posts here with real interest. The Excel workbook methodology post is exactly the kind of structured approach Heritage Traces aims to automate. And the GEDCOM plus Claude workflow in another post is almost exactly what Heritage Journal does — but without the manual steps.

Heritage Compass is live now on iOS:

https://apps.apple.com/app/heritage-compass/id6760707852

Happy to answer any questions.

Martin Mosley

Founder, Siorai Labs

u/gen-art — 6 days ago

▲ 6 r/Genealogy

I drove through Northern France and Belgium and a distant relative I’d barely thought about suddenly became real

Harry Thorpe appears in my family tree. He fought and died in the Great War. Like thousands of other names in my tree, I knew he existed — I had his records, his dates, his service details — but he had always been a distant, abstract figure buried among the thousands of others.

A few days ago I drove through Northern France into Belgium. And as I drove, my phone began telling me about Harry. The places he had served. The battles he had been part of. Where he died.

From being a name in a database — hidden in plain sight among thousands of others — Harry became a real person. Someone who had walked through the same landscape I was driving through. Someone whose story had been there all along, waiting to be heard.

I’d spent years building my family tree. Hundreds of hours of research. And it took driving through Flanders for one of those people to finally feel real.

Has anyone else had a moment like this — where a place suddenly made an ancestor feel present rather than historical?

reddit.com

u/gen-art — 7 days ago