German Handwriting to Text, Including Old German Script

Reading Kurrent and Sütterlin

Until 1941, most German speakers wrote in Kurrent, and from the 1910s many schools taught its tidier cousin, Sütterlin. To a modern reader both look like a row of spikes: e looks like n, h has a long loop below the line, and there's a long s (ſ) that resembles an f. That's why so many family historians get stuck on letters, Feldpost cards, church records and diaries from the 1800s and early 1900s.

This tool is told to expect those scripts. It transcribes them into modern letters while keeping the original spelling, so "Thür" stays "Thür" and isn't silently modernised to "Tür". That makes the transcript usable as a source, not just a rough gist.

Modern German handwriting too

For everyday notes it keeps ä, ö, ü and ß, capitalises nouns as the writer did, and recognises the German way of writing numbers: a 1 with a long upstroke and a crossed 7.

Transcription first, translation second

Searches for "german handwriting translation" usually mean two jobs: reading the script, then translating it. The reading is the hard part. Once you have clean typed German, any translator will give you a decent English version. Trying to translate straight from a photo of Kurrent rarely works.

Tips for old documents

• Photograph in daylight without flash; old paper reflects and flattens faint ink
• Keep the page flat. Curved lines near a book's spine are harder to read
• Shoot one page at a time, close enough that individual letters are sharp
• Names and places are the hardest part of old records, so double-check anything marked [?]

Frequently asked questions