Within the town of Lexington’s historical online archive is a collection of scans of municipal records from 1881 through 1925. But because the records are in handwritten script, they are not searchable. A genealogist, for example, can’t key in “Muzzy” and quickly find the name; she has to read word by word on every page and hope she doesn’t miss anything.
Alethea Yates, the town’s archivist, is changing that. With the support of Town Clerk Mary de Alderete, Yates initiated a project in January that enlists volunteers to transcribe the handwritten records through FromThePage, a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries. Yates personally reviews and corrects each transcription before uploading it. The transcriptions are supplementing, not replacing, the scans of the originals. The effort will help town staff respond more effectively to information requests, and will be a boon for historians, researchers, lawyers, genealogists, those who can’t read cursive—anyone, near and far, with an interest in or a need for this information.
Public transcription projects are underway at institutions like the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian. “It works like this: they post something they want transcribed on the internet and they invite the public to come along and just start typing it out,” Yates says. “I decided that was what we needed to do.” Yates says that more than one hundred volunteers have transcribed some 3,400 pages of handwritten documents since the project launched. “They’re transcribing our documents at a rate of five, six, even 700 pages a week,” she says. “I never in my wildest dreams.”
This initiative sits atop centuries of Lexington ardently preserving what amounts to a compendium of local self-governance since colonial times, from administrivia to matters of life and death. By Yates’s estimate, there are one million hardcopy pages of handwritten documents. Archive records help to settle modern-day legal disputes and clarify town policy. They contain surprises: public historian Margaret Micholet, for example, found evidence that Lexington paid for the medical care of a formerly enslaved man in the early 1800s, despite his having lived in Boxborough for more than twenty-five years—an indication, according to Micholet, that the town acknowledged its continued responsibility for its poor citizens. “We would all be at sea if it weren’t for reference librarians and archivists,” Micholet says.
The town’s earliest record, from 1692, lists the names of more than forty men, including Fiskes, Meriams, and MonRoes, and declares: “April 22 at a meeting of the inhabitants it was voted that David Fiske senr shall be Clark to wright the vots of the inhabitants and keep a Record of them”. The original document—delicate with age, in faded colonial hand—is preserved in one of the town’s fire-proof vaults. A scanned version is online, along with its searchable typed transcription.
Yates explains that the typed version was part of a transcription initiative under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. Documents written before 1881 were transcribed under that program, while the era of handwritten town documents ended in 1925 with the introduction of typewriters — leaving most materials from 1881-1925 in only handwritten form.
The oldest document in the town’s archive, including familiar names like Fiske, Muzzy, and MonRoe, and a typed version of the same document transcribed during the Great Depression for a project of FDR’s Works Progress Administration.
“We have an extraordinarily large collection of town records, old and new,” Yates says, which she attributes to the fact that when the Town Office Building and Cary Memorial Hall were built in the 1920s, the town furnished them with fireproof vaults. “Lexington was able to keep so much of its collection that other towns had to throw away for lack of space,” she says.
The work of preserving the physical archive accelerated in the early 21st century, when then-town clerk Donna Hooper successfully sought Community Preservation Act funding for an additional vault and for archive management and conservation. Nearly $1 million in CPA funding has been spent to date on archive preservation.
The question these days is, why transcribe by hand? Why not use artificial intelligence? The answer is that AI is susceptible to spewing out fake information known as hallucinations. According to Sara and Ben Brumfield, proprietors of the FromThePage crowdsourcing platform, people can spot obvious gibberish, but when hallucinations sound “seductively plausible,” they easily escape notice and infect transcriptions, undermining an archive’s integrity. Archives are supposed to be authoritative sources. “It’s absolutely toxic to have seductively plausible hallucinations in your text,” Ben Brumfield says.
One AI exception is Google’s Gemini 3. Yates tried it and decided against it. It transcribed accurately, but it also added stray marks that she had to remove by hand. At one point, she had to manually jump-start the process when the AI abruptly quit in the middle of a book.
There are benefits to having this work done by human hands, Yates believes. “Having volunteers gets people to feel more committed to the town’s collections and more interested in seeing what’s there,” she says. “And a lot of people just enjoy doing it.” Among them is Lexington resident Karen Griffiths. Whenever she has a few minutes, she says, “I can just do a page and it’s sort of relaxing and interesting.” Former town clerk Donna Hooper says, “I think a nice capability of [FromThePage] is that you can stop wherever you want to stop and somebody else will go and pick up.”
Transcription and digitization are virtually unlocking the vaults of the town’s historic archive. Now, through Yates’ initiative, volunteers from Lexington and everywhere can expand the archive’s utility—and open it to the world.