The National Archives from Constitution Avenue / NPS
If you're one of the shrinking amount of Americans who can read cursive, the National Park Service and the National Archives could use your skills. The loops, swoops, and wiggles of what was once the standard for formal writing is rarely taught in school anymore, which is a problem because many historical documents were prepared before computers and typewriters, and without knowledge of cursive, they may as well be written in a foreign language.
And that's where the cursive-fluent come in. This is your chance to become a citizen-archivist.
The National Archives, the nation's official record keeper, occasionally puts out calls for volunteers to help transcribe very old documents to be processed for modern collections, but this time they're partnering with the National Park Service in their call for aid. In celebration of the 250th anniversary of America's independence, the agency needs help transcribing pension files and bounty-land applications from Revolutionary War veterans.
If you'd like to join the cause, you don't need a history degree, you don't need archival training, and you don't even have any complicated forms to fill out. If interested, simply register here. Once registered, find a file no other volunteers have begun transcribing yet, and you can get to work.
There are some 80,000 files containing over 2 million documents, so it's anybody's guess what you can find searching through the archives. That's the joy of hitorical discovery after all.
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