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The National Archives has started an initiative to help transcribe and digitise historical documents written in cursive in honor of America’s quarter-century.
Millions of documents in the Archives have never been typeset in a contemporary font. Since cursive is no longer a popular subject in schools, many Americans nowadays may find it difficult to understand them when they are written in longhand.
One of the main objectives of the Citizen Archivist project is to digitise and transcribe several handwritten papers related to the pensions that soldiers received during the Revolutionary War.
The National Park Service and the Archives are working together to transcribe over 2.3 million pages of pension files belonging to the country’s founding veterans and their widows as part of the Revolutionary War Pension Project.
Pensions were once restricted to George Washington’s Continental Army men. Subsequent legislation made pensions available to widows and militia members. Every document serves as a window into the past that lets us see into the lives of these pioneers.
Over 4,000 volunteers from the Revolutionary War Pension Project have typed up more than 80,000 pages of pension files so far, and more than 2,300 documents have been fully transcribed.