How to Read Old Russian Handwriting (Skoropis): First Steps

Everyone has the same first reaction to a scan of an old parish register: this is unreadable. Letters run together, words make no sense, the ink has faded. But pre-revolutionary Russian handwriting (skoropis, literally “cursive”) is not a cipher. It is simply a different hand, and you learn it like a language: first syllable by syllable, then fluently.

Why it is hard

Letters join in unfamiliar ways, words were abbreviated, and signs that have fallen out of use were common: the letter “yat”, the “decimal i”, the hard sign at the end of words, the titlo mark over abbreviations. An eye used to printed type does not at first tell them apart.

Where to start

Do not read straight through. Hold on to what you know: names, dates, month names, standard formulas such as “a son was born to so-and-so” or “were married”. Metric books (metricheskie knigi, parish birth, marriage and death registers) follow a template. Once you recognise the structure of an entry, you fill in the rest from meaning.

The main technique: compare

Find a word you know for certain, for example a name. Remember how this scribe writes each letter, and look for the same letters in the words you cannot read. In effect you are building a personal handwriting table for that particular scribe, because each one writes differently.

Helpers, and patience

Helpers include tables of the pre-revolutionary alphabet, palaeography handbooks and handwriting recognition in Yandex Archive. But a machine makes mistakes on complicated hands, so check against the scan. And be patient. The first pages are painful. After a hundred entries by one scribe you read almost freely.

Keep what you decode next to the person it concerns, so you do not decipher the same thing twice. In Heritage AI that is convenient. The free research plan is at /en.

Requests to Russian archives are written in Russian. Heritage AI prepares the letter text for you.