I Spent 4 Months Digitizing My Family's Handwritten Recipes Before They Disappeared Forever

A few months ago, I was flipping through a box of old recipe cards and found one for Chicken Tetrazzini. My mom's been making it for as long as I can remember. The handwriting was faded, the card was warped, and there was a grease stain on it older than me.

It sort of hit me: this could disappear. A fire. A flood. A move where someone tosses the wrong box. These aren't just instructions for meals — they're pieces of our history.

So I spent the next 4 months building a private digital archive for my family.

The Goal

We have handwritten recipes scattered across index cards, notebooks, magazines, printed emails, old Microsoft Access database files. Aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents — decades of cooking history spread across multiple households.

1. Digitize everything into a single, searchable archive
2. Preserve the original handwritten cards — not just the text, but the actual images
3. Make it accessible to family members who aren't technical
4. Track how recipes evolve over time
5. Ensure it all survives longer than the paper it's written on

Why Preserving the Originals Mattered

It would've been easy to just parse the text and store it in a database. But there's something irreplaceable about seeing your grandmother's handwriting. The smudges. The crossed-out corrections. The grease stains from thirty years of use.

Every recipe in the archive keeps the original scanned image alongside the structured data.

The Emotional Payoff

Seeing family members pull up a decades-old recipe on their tablet while cooking, or sharing a digitized card from a passed relative — it's incredibly rewarding. These recipes aren't just food. They're stories, traditions, love. Now they're preserved forever.

Built at Oakdale Engineering. By CW