Digitizing Old Notebooks, Any Tips?

My wife has tasked herself with preserving the many notebooks of lessons and other things that her late great grandfather wrote, and we are looking for the best way to speed things up. 

To date she has done speech-to-text, then gone through and edited what came up. This system actually works pretty well for her, with one key thing. She wants to preserve his "voice", and so she'll go back and underline what he underlined, misspell words as he actually had them written, etc. She will then make another copy that is edited properly, but the key point being if she or any of the family want to go back and see how he wrote, they could. 

So, my main focus that I'm looking for something to improve upon is not OCR, but more the actual visual digitization. 

I've found stuff on Amazon like this Document Scanner.

It seems like the main thing they do besides have a camera is have "good" OCR software. 

I have a not terribly old iPhone laying around that I'm sure we could make a stand for with good lighting and use that to take consistent photos, but then what is the best way to crop them and put them into a PDF?

As always, I appreciate any input you all have. You guys rock!

The notes app on iphone can scan documents and automatically crop them. I've never tried to save as PDF but it does give an option to print so maybe you could print to pdf then compile them?

In reply to AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) :

Maybe try a newer android? My camera will recognize text and give me an option to scan it on as a pdf instead of just taking a picture. 

You can probably find the Samsung camera app somewhere too as a standalone.

Our HP printer works via an app, and that app includes a camera scanner. Take a picture, and it quickly saves the doc as a pdf. Maybe something like that would work? I don't know if it does OCR, though. 

I use an app on my iPhone called ScannerPro and it does an awesome job of aligning the shot and making a pdf from the scans. I don't recall if I paid anything for it but if I did it was a one time small fee like five bucks. 
 

Btw, that's a super cool thing your wife is doing. 

My printer will scan to PDF. I'm pretty sure most of them will. That would probably be the quickest. 

Android will also bulk scan to PDF using Google Drive. I would assume iOS will do the same. 

Somehow Ancestry.com scans very old documents, with a wide variety of handwriting styles of the past, and makes the text searchable. 

I don't know how they do it but they do.

Genius app is what i do to scan documents to pdf

Are they bound, or can the pages be scanned? If they can be scanned, the raven scanner is the best for something like this. It makes searchable pdfs and puts them in the cloud, quickly. 
https://www.raven.com

In reply to Steve_Jones :

They're bound. Any traditional style scanner isn't going to work. Thanks.