Comment by vintermann

I wish! I do genealogy, I would love automated transcription of historical documents. Have I? Oh yes! It wasn't rhetorical that I could find you thousands of pages. Here's one book if you want a link: https://media.digitalarkivet.no/view/166325/4

But every time I find something that I think "This one is surely easy enough!" it's usually wrong. US revolutionary war cursive is on the easy end; it's quite similar to modern cursive, and what is of training data in the datasets is probably a lot like it, if not actually in it - historians who test this complain about overfitting. Which I believe, because as I said, I see that it's bad at generalizing.