Ancestry Image Transcript - New Beta Feature

 Ancestry now has an AI Image Transcription tool in beta. Here is how to use it:

1. Upload an image of a letter, newspaper article, etc., into your gallery. 

2. Open the image, in the upper left is a Transcribe button. Click It. 

3. The transcription appears in a window on the right side of the screen. 

Here is the image I used and the transcription generated

In this case, it was 100% accurate. I also tried a handwritten record from a Deed Book from 1886. It took longer and was not as accurate. A couple of the people's names were incorrect, but the rest of the text was pretty accurate. This will definitely be a time saver.   

Giving thanks for Citizen Archivists

From NARA 

If you’ve been reading our newsletter for a while or follow the National Archives on social media, you might have heard of our largest Citizen Archivist mission — the pension applications of Revolutionary War veterans.  This mission is a special partnership with the National Park Service.  We hope that unlocking these pensions will bring first hand accounts of the American Revolution to park visitors. We are grateful for all the work our Citizen Archivists have done in advancing this mission.

A couple of weeks ago, we added a new mission for Native American patriots who applied for pensions from the federal government.  These men were identified as Native Americans by the Daughters of the American Revolution.  Many of the files name the tribal affiliation of the veteran. 

If you’d like to be Citizen Archivist and join us in transcribing and tagging records you can find more information here.  And if reading cursive isn’t your superpower, don’t worry!  You can tag already transcribed pensions from the American Revolution, or participate in one of our other missions featuring typed records.

Are you interested in a challenge?  We’re putting particularly difficult to decipher pension records in our Transcriber Task Force mission.  These records often have incomplete pages or pages where the original transcriber couldn’t make out many of the words. Check them out, review each page by page, and see if you can make them readable.