Can anyone recommend good resources for deciphering Napoleonic-era handwriting ?
My wife's Great-Great-Great Grandfather was an Assistant Surgeon in the British Army during the Peninsuala, Lowland and 100 Day campaigns.
A relation has his diaries, and has started sharing images - which seem to start in July 1813, which is about the time I believed he was transferred from the 1st/91st to the 2nd/91st and Swedish Pomerania/Northern Germany.
Frustratingly, his handwriting his pretty hard to read - I can only decipher one word in three. I spent some time going down google rabbit holes (and experimenting with Transkribus), but was unable to find a good solution for this palaeography challenge !
I also had a go at Transkribus, using a page of a letter that I had found particularly hard to decipher. The results were gobbledygook, reading like bad OCR, and much worse than I could figure out on my own. I think for difficult and atypical hands, the program needs to be trained on that particular form of cursive. Presumably then it can produce reasonably accurate transcriptions of any number of pages in the same hand, but for one or two letters, the training would be more work than deciphering it yourself!