This paper presents a flexible approach to extracting content from scanned historical documents using semantic information. The final electronic document is the result of a "digital historical document lifecycle" process, where the expert knowledge of the historian/archivist user is incorporated at different stages. Results show that such a conversion strategy aided by (expert) user-specified semantic information and which enables the processing of individual parts of the document in a specialised way, produces superior (in a variety of significant ways) results than document analysis and understanding techniques devised for contemporary documents.