Centuries of handwritten Norwegian records were transcribed, validated and structured for a genealogy platform serving global family-history research.
The challenge
The archive contained Norwegian handwritten records spanning centuries, including scripts that standard OCR could not interpret.
Large-scale extraction had to protect record integrity while surfacing uncertain or illegible fields for expert review.
The approach
SBL trained a specialist team with Norwegian genealogy rules and handwriting patterns before transcription scaled.
The workflow combined structured transcription, discrepancy queries and quality checks for platform-ready datasets.
Train
Define linguistic rules and handwriting examples with genealogy context.
Transcribe
Convert census, death and military records into structured data.
Resolve
Raise and close discrepancies before final dataset delivery.
The result
The genealogy provider received high-accuracy structured records that could connect users to deeper family-history evidence.
- More than 80 million records were processed.
- Archaic Norwegian handwriting was interpreted by trained specialists.
- Quality checks supported a 99.5% accuracy target.
- The delivery created reusable rules for other non-English archive programs.