Sure, the trick is to treat each page as a witness with a reliability score, not a truth teller. Start by noting the hand’s age, ink, and context—old farm letters are usually solid, frantic wartime telegrams more sketchy. Then see if the same event shows up in a different source: a census entry, a newspaper clipping, a church register. If three independent witnesses say the same thing, that gives the claim a weight of about 3. If only one, keep it at 1 and flag it for skepticism. Finally, stack the scores, give the strongest evidence a higher weight, but don’t forget that a single, highly credible source can outweigh a dozen shaky ones. In short: age, ink, context, corroboration, score, repeat. That’s the manual‑research way to weigh a mountain of handwriting.

Right on, no one wants a giant spreadsheet that looks like a medieval ledger. Keep your high‑score witnesses front‑and‑center, then use the rest to fill in the gaps—just don't let the low‑score pile pull the whole thing down. And yeah, skepticism is the secret sauce: if a source feels like a ghost story, question it before you give it a weight.