Decipher old letters online
Love letters, letters from home and diaries from a bygone time – written in a hand no one can read anymore. Upload a photo and let the words speak again.
Drop a photo of your handwriting here
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The letters hold the family's history
Before the telephone and email, the letter was how families stayed connected. People wrote at births and deaths, from the front and from abroad, between lovers and between siblings. The letters that survive are therefore more than paper: they are the family's own voice from a time no one living remembers.
Why the old letters are hard to read
The letters were written by people who had learned Gothic handwriting at school. The hand is often hurried and emotional, the spelling follows the old orthography, and the content is full of references to people and circumstances only the sender and recipient knew. For today's descendants the result is a letter you can hold but not read.
Read the letters – and pass the story on
A single deciphered letter can change a family's sense of itself. Upload a photo and make the text readable in minutes. The letter can be translated into 30+ languages so relatives abroad can read along, and read aloud as audio – a lovely gift for older family members. The first 3 pages are free.
What you'll find — and what our AI can read
- Gothic handwriting – as the letter-writers learned before 1875
- Hurried, emotional everyday handwriting
- Old orthography and personal abbreviations
From old handwriting to readable text
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