Italian handwriting to text for old family letters
Letters sent between Italy and the families who left it are often hard to read even for Italian speakers. Upload a photo and get the text typed out exactly as it was written; the first page is free, the whole document is $5.
Why these letters are hard to read
Many emigrant letters were written by people with only a few years of school, or dictated to someone who wrote for the village. The spelling follows the sound of the local dialect rather than standard Italian, words run together, and punctuation is rare. A reader who expects textbook Italian will "correct" the text and lose exactly what makes it yours.
The tool copies what is on the page: dialect spellings, doubled or missing consonants and all. Words it cannot make out are marked rather than replaced with a standard Italian word that happens to fit.
Church and civil records
Italian civil records from the nineteenth century onward are mostly in Italian and follow a fixed formula, which helps. Parish registers are frequently in Latin, with names in their Latin forms. If your page is a church record, choose Latin instead of Italian before uploading.
What families usually bring
- Letters and postcards between Italy and relatives abroad
- Birth, marriage and death records from the comune
- Parish register entries in Latin
- Passports and military papers
- Handwritten family recipes
Everything about how the tool works, what it costs and how your documents are handled is on the handwriting to text page.
Questions and answers
Will it fix the spelling into standard Italian?
No. The text is copied as written, including dialect spellings. That keeps the document faithful and lets a translator or a relative interpret it afterwards.
Can it read Latin parish records?
Yes. Select Latin (church records) as the language. Abbreviations are copied as they appear on the page.
Does it translate into English?
No. You get the original text typed out, which you can then translate with any translation tool.