Read the letter your great-grandmother wrote in 1892 — today, on your phone.
CursiveLens is an old handwriting translator for family historians. Photograph an old letter, a will, a deed, or a census page, and get a typed transcript, a plain-English summary, and the people, places, and dates the document names. It is how you read old documents in a hand nobody can: faded ink, looping copperplate, secretary hand, letters crossed sideways to save paper.
CURSIVE TO TEXT, BUILT FOR OLD DOCUMENTS
Most handwriting-to-text apps exist to digitize the notes you took this morning, and they fall apart on a 19th-century will. CursiveLens is the opposite: an old handwriting reader for other people's writing, long ago, in a hand nobody uses any more. Tell it what it is looking at — letter, will, deed, census return, diary page — plus roughly when it was written, and that context is what turns cursive into text instead of guesswork.
WHAT ONE PHOTO GIVES YOU
• A faithful transcript that keeps the original line breaks and marks anything genuinely unreadable as [illegible]
• A plain-English summary, so you know what a document says before you work through every word
• Extracted people, places, and dates, tagged and searchable
TRANSCRIBE OLD LETTERS, A WHOLE DOCUMENT AT A TIME
• Scan with the built-in document scanner, import from your gallery, or open a PDF
• A four-page letter stays one document, not four loose photos
• Works on old originals, archive photocopies, microfilm printouts, and research-site screenshots
• Re-transcribe any page with a different era or document-type hint
YOU ARE THE FINAL AUTHORITY
Your image and its transcript sit side by side. Pinch to zoom into the word giving you trouble, correct the text yourself, and your correction is what gets saved. CursiveLens is a research tool, not an oracle — it shows you what it could not read rather than quietly inventing a word.
AN ARCHIVE THAT STAYS FINDABLE
Every old document you transcribe lands in a searchable library with a title, a date, and the names it mentions. Search every transcript at once for a surname, a farm, a ship, or a regiment — the line you half-remember reading is one tap away.
SHARE THE FIND
Export a transcript as plain text, or as a PDF holding the original image and the transcription together — ready to send to a cousin, attach to a research log, or file with a family tree.
WHO IT IS FOR
Genealogists and family historians who have hit an old document they cannot read. Anyone who inherited a shoebox of old family letters. Local historians, archivists, and students working from primary sources. This is genealogy handwriting help for the moment you think "what does this old letter say".
WHAT IT READS
Old handwriting in English from roughly the 1700s onward, plus common European hands, in the old documents genealogy actually turns up: letters, wills and probate papers, deeds and land records, census returns, parish registers, diaries, ledgers, postcards, and the backs of photographs.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Your documents and transcripts live on your phone. There is no account, no sign-up, and no cloud archive to lock your research inside. A page is sent for transcription only in the moment you ask for one, and it is never stored on a server afterwards.
FREE TO TRY, THEN PRO
Your first three documents are free — enough to prove it on your own old family papers. CursiveLens Pro unlocks unlimited transcriptions, an unlimited library, and PDF export.
Pro is an auto-renewing subscription: an annual plan that opens with a 7-day free trial, or a monthly plan if you would rather not commit to a year. Prices show in your currency, billing goes through Google Play, and you can cancel any time.
CursiveLens is made by Adelyons Software LLC.
Terms of Use: https://adelyons.com/apps/cursivelens/terms.html
Privacy Policy: https://adelyons.com/apps/cursivelens/privacy.html
Questions, or a document it struggled with? Email dev@adelyons.com.
Recent changes:
CursiveLens now speaks 9 languages — the whole app, not just this listing. Set your device to German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, or Portuguese and every screen follows.
Also: faster, more reliable photo capture — camera and library photos are optimized before reading, fixing documents that used to fail or crawl on a full-resolution photo.
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