Last year, the last of my grand parents passed away. Thinking about family, I decided to see how difficult it would be to dig up my family history and explore my family tree.
Since then, I managed to find most of my ancestors history, dating back to the late 18th century. That is as far as the online national archives in Belgium could get me. Digging through church archives is a lot harder. It is amazing how much and how fast I could find/retrieve from behind my desk at home.
With a feeling of nostalgia, I realized that the digital world no longer produces these handwritten documents. They are fascinating though: no standard formats, all containing different levels of detail, written in different languages, using different calendars (thank you Napoleon), and some using vocabulary that is no longer used. They are just beautiful.
PS: They were digitized to preserve them or otherwise they would have most likely been lost. How ironic is that 😉
Blanca Lopez
I love that old handwritting but it’s hard to read (and I know this because I live with a Historian). There are so many archives that are yet to be digitised and there’s no software (as far as I know) that can read some of those beautiful characters.