Using Transkribus for Old German

 

Transkribus.

Transkribus is a platform for text recognition, image analysis and structure recognition for historic documents. It is a European-developed artificial intelligence tool, with an increasing number of non-European institutions joining the cooperative behind the platform. I remember seeing them at RootsTech 2025, but until now I had used it. The old German handwriting on the documents for my current search is a perfect use for the tool.

Using an extract from the Saxony Anhalt Baptism records of 1817 I shared earlier, above is an example showing the entry for Anna Dorothea Sophia Hesse, daughter of Friedrich Hesse and Dorothea Sophia Gagelmann. Once the image is loaded onto the Transkribus platform, it takes a few seconds to scan, and the tool returns a helpful transcription into German on the right side. This can be copied and pasted into Google Translate, giving a pretty good approximation of the text.

It is free to create an account, and there are different tiers from free with limited credits, to scholar to team and organization. I'll be trying out the tool further on these German texts.