The bureaucrats are asking for help: Apparently cursive is beyond them.
It warms my heart to see that the old ways can be used to circumvent the government. 😉
'It's not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it's how much you use cursive today,' Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, DC, told USA Today.
'We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,' Isaacs explained, saying there are more than 200 years worth of documents to get through.
Just think of what could be in there: Letters to wives, military orders, mysterious maps to the lost treasure of the Templars...
The organization has registered over 5,000 citizen archivists but could still use more help.
'There's no application,' Isaacs said. 'You just pick a record that hasn't been done and read the instructions. It's easy to do for a half-hour a day or a week.'
The records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the 1950 Census.
I may have just found a new hobby.
Think of all the history that has yet to be uncovered in Revolutionary War pension records!
Most American schools no longer teach the handwriting form, instead focusing on keyboard skills.
Currently, 24 states require cursive to be taught — but that alone may not help with the National Archives task at hand.
I guess they haven't realized that homeschoolers exist yet!
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