There are jokes online that say that we, the older generation, have a super-power that the younger generation know nothing about... reading cursive writing. It is a skill that could be fading away over time. But if you know how to read cursive, the nation needs you.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, as the National Archives are officially known, is the nation's record keeper. The archives contain materials dating back to the founding of the U.S. related to the business conducted by the federal government.
A majority of the records in the Archives were written before typewriters or other mechanical writing tools were developed and were written by hand, in cursive. As fewer people retain the knowledge of how to read and write cursive, it can be harder to get help transcribing many of these records.
To make these records easier to access, the National Archives enlists volunteer citizen archivists from around the world to help transcribe and catalog the documents important to the United States.
That's where you come in. To begin, the only thing a potential historian needs to do is register for a free account. Once that account is made, volunteers can simply start reading a document that hasn't been organized yet.
Suzanne Issacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington D.C. told USA Today, "There's no application, you just pick a record that hasn't been done and read the instructions. It's easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”