How it works
AI trained on centuries of French handwriting
Transkribus uses deep learning trained on millions of handwritten pages from the 16th century to the present day. The AI recognises the distinctive letter forms of historical French scripts — from the elaborate loops of old cursive to the precise strokes of administrative ronde — and converts them into modern, searchable text.
Reads old French cursive, ronde, bâtarde, and administrative hands
300+ public models for different handwriting styles and time periods
Works with phone photos or high-resolution scans
Family research
Unlock centuries of French-language records
Parish registers, notarial acts, état civil records, and Revolution-era documents — the French-speaking world left behind an enormous paper trail stretching back five hundred years. Whether your ancestors lived in France, Quebec, Louisiana, Belgium, or Switzerland, Transkribus reads their handwriting so you can focus on the history.
Parish registers (registres paroissiaux) — baptisms, marriages, and burials
Notarial acts (actes notariés) — contracts, wills, and property transfers
Civil registration (état civil) from the Revolution onward
Census records and tax rolls (rôles de taille)
Quebec parish and seigneurial records
Personal letters, diaries, and family correspondence
Beyond the demo
The full platform for historical documents
The demo above gives you a taste. The full Transkribus platform lets you process thousands of pages, train custom AI models on your specific handwriting, search across all your documents, and export in any format you need.
Train custom models on your family's specific handwriting
Full-text search across all your transcribed documents
Export as TXT, DOCX, PDF, TEI-XML, or PAGE XML
Collaborate with family members and share collections
What you can transcribe
Common documents in old French handwriting
If you are researching French, Belgian, Swiss, or Québécois ancestry, you will encounter a vast range of handwritten documents across centuries. Transkribus handles them all — from densely abbreviated 16th-century parish entries to elegant 19th-century administrative records.
Parish registers dating back to the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539)
Notarial archives — the backbone of French genealogy research
État civil records from 1792 onward
Military service records and correspondence
Land surveys, cadastral records, and property deeds
Personal letters, recipe books, and household accounts
Background
What are old French scripts?
French handwriting evolved significantly over the centuries. Documents from different periods and regions look entirely different, and reading them requires familiarity with the script conventions of the time. Here are the main styles you will encounter:
Bâtarde – a late medieval French hand widely used in the 15th and 16th centuries, with angular, compressed letter forms
Ronde – a rounded, formal script used for legal and administrative documents from the 17th century onward
Coulée – a slanted, flowing cursive that became common in the 18th and 19th centuries
Administrative hand – the standard hand of government clerks, notaries, and registrars
Anglaise – the French copperplate style adopted in the 19th century for formal correspondence
The technology
How does French handwriting recognition work?
Handwriting recognition (HTR – Handwritten Text Recognition) uses deep learning neural networks to convert images of handwritten text into machine-readable characters. Unlike OCR for printed text, HTR must handle the infinite variation in human handwriting — different letter shapes, connected strokes, and personal styles that change across centuries.
Neural networks trained on millions of handwritten samples
Layout analysis detects lines and text regions automatically
Character-level recognition handles connected and cursive writing
Language models improve accuracy by understanding word context
AI Models for French Handwriting
Browse public models trained on historical French documents — cursive, ronde, administrative hands, and more.
Ready to read old French handwriting?
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200M+Pages processed
500K+Users worldwide
300+Public AI models