Polish · Image to Text
Polish records in every script they were written in
Polish history is written down in more alphabets than most: Latin charters full of Polish place names, Gothic and Bastarda book hands, Renaissance chancery italic, German Kurrent under Prussia and Austria, and Russian civil cursive east of the 1815 border. Evidano treats each as its own hand rather than a variant of modern print.
Choose the hand or document type
Medieval Latin Charters with Polish Namesc. 1100–1400Transcribe charters from Piast Poland: Caroline and Gothic documentary hands, suspension marks, Tironian et and Polish place names spelled a dozen ways.
Old Polish Gothic and Bastarda Manuscriptsc. 1350–1550Read Old Polish in Gothic textualis and bastarda: digraph spelling, hooked nasal vowels, Latin glosses and psalters where three languages share one column.
Polish Chancery and Humanistic Handsc. 1500–1700Transcribe Polish and Latin from Renaissance chancery and italic hands: elongated display lines, abbreviated titles, faint diacritics and registration notes.
Polish-Language Kurrent in Prussian and Austrian Recordsc. 1650–1918Transcribe Polish names and words written in German Kurrent: partition-era civil registers, parish books, land plans and letters with faint diacritics.
Polish and Russian Civil Records in the Russian Partitionc. 1800–1918Transcribe civil registers of the Russian partition: Napoleonic-format acts in Polish, the same books in Russian after 1868, and Polish names in Cyrillic.
Transcribing Polish across the centuries
The oldest documents from Poland are in Latin, and the Polish in them is limited to names — of villages, rivers and people — spelled as a Latin-trained scribe heard them, which is what makes them such valuable evidence and such hard reading. Continuous Polish appears in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in sermons, psalters and bible translations written in Gothic Textualis and Bastarda, using digraphs and unsettled diacritics for sounds the Latin alphabet had no letters for. After 1500 the Commonwealth chanceries write Polish and Latin side by side in a Renaissance cursive.
The partitions split the record in two. In Prussia and Austria the state wrote in German Kurrent, so Polish names, villages and occupations had to be squeezed into a Gothic alphabet that had no ł, ą or ż, with the family’s own spelling often surviving only in a Latin-script signature. In the Russian partition the Napoleonic civil act kept its Polish wording until 1868, when the same formula, the same books and the same clerks continued in Russian, with pre-reform letters and Polish surnames pushed through Cyrillic.
Editors of diplomatic codices, philologists working on Old Polish spelling, town historians, genealogists moving between three partitions and archivists indexing registers by the shelf-metre face the same problem: a page nobody reads fluently any more. A transcription that follows the letterforms, marks what is damaged and keeps every spelling as written is where their own work starts.
Not sure which hand you have?
Upload a page, pick the closest domain, and test the prompt on one page before running the rest. You can switch domains at any time.