Handwriting Recognition

One of the largest uses of the world-wide web is doing genealogy. There are a number of records that exist and are already on the Internet. More information about people is being added every day. Last night I spent some time contributing to that effort.

The LDS Church sponsors a lot of the genealogy and run a site called www.familysearch.org. If you are interested in finding out about your ancestors, please give it a visit and see what information they have. That information does not appear magically. There are many thousands of volunteers that collect handwritten and paper records, scan them into a computer, and provide an index to the scans. The index is used when you do a search for a name and can locate the scan of the image. That way, when you type in the name "John Allen", the computer can look up all records for associated with that name. In case you are wondering, there are a lot of them and so a birth or death date will also be helpful for locating the correct person.

I had a coworker once ask why they just don't use handwriting recognition to index all of the scanned images. If you spend some time looking at old records, you quickly realize that no software in the world will recognize even a small percentage of that writing. Nope, it requires using one of the most powerful computers in the world: a human mind. Remember that the next time you are stuck on a math problem or are feeling less than intelligent. While you may not be able to read your doctor's prescription, at least you can read a note from your mother or child.