What documents can you read?
Civil records, parish registers, notarial deeds, family letters, wartime correspondence, postcards — in old French as well as German script (Kurrentschrift, Sütterlin), from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Anywhere in France, French-speaking Belgium (Wallonia and Brussels, whose civil registration has followed the same Napoleonic form as the French one since 1796) and Germany — including Belgium's East Cantons, kept in German until 1920. Particular expertise in Moselle, Luxembourg and the surrounding border region. Two reservations: parish registers from the Ancien Régime are often written in Church Latin — they are transcribed and fully translated into English and French, but the reading is then explicitly flagged as less certain and the confidence level lowered accordingly; and records written in Dutch (Flanders) are not covered.
Do I need an account or a subscription?
Neither. You upload your image, you pay $3.00, you get your result. If you buy a pack, you receive a code: keep it and you can come back to use your remaining credits whenever you like.
How long does it take?
Less than two minutes in the vast majority of cases. The result appears directly in your browser; you can also email it to yourself, at the address entered when paying.
Is my document kept?
For as short a time as possible. When you pay per document, your image is held for at most two hours — long enough to complete the payment — and deleted as soon as the transcription is delivered. When you use a credit code, it is never stored at all. Only the resulting text stays available for twenty-four hours, so you can come back to it if you close the tab. The deciphering itself is performed by Claude, Anthropic's artificial intelligence, which deletes the image and text from its servers within thirty days and does not use them to train its models.
On your own device, however, the result and the image remain available for seven days in your browser (nothing is sent back to KinScribe): reloading the page, losing your connection or closing the tab won't lose anything. The "Clear all" button deletes them.
A service request submitted through the form follows a different rule, because it involves an exchange: the request and any attached documents are kept for as long as it takes to handle it, and at most ninety days, then deleted automatically. You can ask for them to be deleted sooner by quoting your reference.
Can I correct the text before saving it?
Yes — the workflow is built around it. The result appears next to your scan in editable fields: you correct whatever you want, in particular the words flagged as uncertain, then you choose which versions to export.
In what formats can I save the result?
Your choice, for each version: image (PNG), PDF, or plain text (.txt) to paste into your genealogy software.
Is the transcription guaranteed to be accurate?
No, and we would rather say so plainly. Artificial intelligence makes deciphering old handwriting enormously easier, but it does not guarantee a perfect reading. Doubtful passages are flagged, and you should check the decisive details — dates, names, parentage — against the original record before treating them as settled.
What if the image is unreadable or the result unusable?
Click "Result unreadable or unusable?" below the transcription: an email already filled in with the document's reference opens. Another attempt or a refund, guaranteed.
Can I withdraw after receiving my transcription?
No — and that is why there is a box to tick before payment. For digital content delivered immediately, the law provides that the fourteen-day right of withdrawal is extinguished once you have requested immediate performance and acknowledged giving up that right, which is exactly what ticking the box confirms. A transcription already on your screen cannot be "given back", and the law takes account of that.
Credit packs follow a more favourable rule: at the time of purchase nothing has been delivered to you yet. Within fourteen days you may therefore ask for a refund of the credits you have not used; only the documents already transcribed remain payable.
How does a service request work?
Nothing is paid when you send the request. You describe what you need in the
form, attach your documents if you have any, and receive an eight-character reference. The request is read, and you then receive by email either a quote or — this happens with some searches — an explanation that the record no longer exists or was never digitized. That second answer costs nothing. Payment comes only once you have accepted the quote.
What exactly happens when I click "pay"?
Three steps, no surprises. One: you leave KinScribe for a secure payment page run by our payment provider, Stripe — its address begins with checkout.stripe.com. Two: you pay $3.00, once; your bank may ask you to confirm the payment in its app or by text message. Your card number is entered on Stripe's page: it never passes through KinScribe and we never see it. Three: you are brought straight back here, your transcription appears, and a receipt is emailed to you. No account to create, no subscription, no card stored for later.
