The best way to digitize old letters

A plain guide to scanning old letters and journals, preserving the originals, and turning the handwriting into words you can read.

31 October 2026 · 5 minute read

A box of inherited letters sits unopened for years for a reason that has nothing to do with sentiment. It is heavy, it is fragile, and nobody is certain it will ever be read. Writing about her own inherited collection, one genealogist put it plainly:

“I must admit that at times I have had the thought to just throw them away… telling myself that no one would take the time to read them.”

FamilySearch, Preserving Our Family Letters

Most guides to digitizing old letters, or digitising them if you spell it that way, stop at the scanning. You end up with four hundred photographs of handwriting, which is safer than a damp box in the loft and exactly as hard to read. The job is only finished when you can read the words.

Sorting old family letters before you scan anything

A box of old family letters is rarely just letters. There will be certificates, postcards and old documents mixed in, and old paper fails in predictable ways. It tears along the folds and goes brittle at the edges. Sorting first means you never discover that halfway through pressing a lid onto something.

Wash your hands and skip the cotton gloves. They cut your grip and make tearing more likely. Clean dry hands are what conservators use now.

The best way to scan old letters: scanner or phone?

It depends on the paper, not on how much of it you have. The US National Archives is blunt about getting this wrong: "The lid of the scanner can crush and crease the original if the paper doesn't fit on the scanner."

A scanner is better for anything flat that fits on the glass. Even light, no wonky angles, nothing to go wrong.

Your phone is better for everything else, and for large piles. Put the letter on a table near a window, hold the phone directly above it so the page fills the frame, and keep your own shadow out of the shot. The same method is the best way to scan old journals and diaries, and if you reach for a scanning app at this point, the Microsoft Lens alternatives are the ones still working: prop the book open on two folded towels rather than forcing the spine flat.

One thing to avoid completely: the kind of scanner that pulls pages through on rollers. The National Archives says those "are not suitable for fragile, weak, bent, or valuable papers." It will eventually eat something you cannot replace.

Settings for digitizing old documents and letters

Scanner software asks a lot of questions. Two answers matter and the rest you can ignore.

Turn the quality up. The setting is called DPI and it just means how much detail gets captured. More detail means you can zoom in later without the writing turning to mush. The National Archives uses 400 as its own minimum, so use that as your floor, and go to 600 for pencil or faded ink. UCLA's genealogy guide sets the bar lower at 200 for plain text, which tells you 400 is comfortable rather than extravagant.

Leave it in colour. Black and white looks tidier and throws away the cream of old paper, the difference between fountain pen and biro, and the second colour of ink that shows a line was added later. None of that comes back.

If the software offers to save as TIFF, choose it. It simply means nothing gets thrown away. If it does not offer that, JPEG at the highest quality is fine.

Photograph the back of everything

People who paid for paper used all of it. Postscripts run up the margins, addresses sit on the reverse, and a blank-looking back often has pencil showing through from the other side.

The same goes if you are digitizing old photos from the same box, since the only thing identifying who is in the picture is usually written on the back. Envelopes count too. A postmark dates a letter the writer never dated, and a return address is often the only record of where somebody lived.

Turning handwritten letters into text

Digitizing handwritten letters properly means ending up with words, not pictures. This is the step that turns a folder of images into something your family will actually open, and the reason it matters more every year:

“Cursive writing, too, seems to be unreadable to this generation.”

Jeannette Holland Austin, Genealogy Tips

You have the images. You still cannot search them, quote from them, or send a readable copy to anyone.

Before you try anything automatic, it is worth knowing that ChatGPT reads handwriting reasonably well and invents words when it cannot, which on a letter about a family name is the worst place for it to guess. Typing them out yourself works and is accurate. You will not get through four hundred letters that way, so save it for the ones that matter most.

For the rest, photograph each page into Polishr. It reads the handwriting and gives you back the words as text you can edit, correct and search. Then you ask for whatever you need in plain words: a tidy version to print, a short summary for the family group chat, or the whole letter in another language if half the family has moved. It handles typed and printed pages as well, so a box holding letters, certificates and old carbon copies can go through in one pass.

A word of warning whichever route you take. Always check names and places against the picture. Those are what machines get wrong, and they are exactly what a family archive exists for. Keep the text alongside the scan, never instead of it: the text makes it findable, the picture is the record.

Keep three copies

The National Archives recommends the rule professionals use: "Three copies, stored on two different media, and one copy located off-site." At home that means a drive on your desk, a second drive at a relative's house, and a cloud account.

How to preserve old letters and documents after scanning

After a week of scanning the box looks like clutter. Keep it anyway. The National Archives puts it plainly: "Keep your originals after you digitize them, because digital files have their own preservation risks."

The best way to preserve old letters is dull and effective: store them flat, somewhere with a steady temperature. Attics and basements are the two worst rooms in any house, because both swing between hot and cold and damp and dry. An ordinary cupboard indoors beats either. The Northeast Document Conservation Center publishes free leaflets on storage and repair.

Common questions

How long does it take to digitize a box of old letters?

A minute or two per page once you find a rhythm. If the box is mostly notebooks rather than letters, the eight methods compared here will get you through it faster. Do all the photographing first so nothing can be lost, then deal with the words afterwards.

Is a scanning service worth paying for?

For a few hundred sturdy loose pages, yes. For anything fragile or irreplaceable, no. They work at speed, and speed is what damages old paper.

What about letters in pencil?

Use the higher quality setting and do not turn up the contrast while scanning. Pencil is faint and easily lost. Adjust a copy afterwards instead.

What if the letters are in another language?

Get the words out first, then translate, and keep both. A translation made from the text can be checked by someone who reads the language. One made straight from a photograph cannot. Polishr produces both from the same photograph, in twelve languages.

How do I store and organize old family letters afterwards?

A folder per person, or per decade, is enough. Keep the paper originals in acid-free folders in the same order as the files, so anyone can move between the two. Archiving old family letters fails when the scheme gets clever, not when it stays simple.

Can I just use the scanner app on my phone?

For taking the picture, yes. What those apps hand back is usually a PDF picture of the handwriting rather than words, so you are still left with the last step. The two buttons on an iPhone that do different things are explained in scanning handwriting to text on iPhone.