Mark and I found an old document that mentioned Titus. We had difficulty translating it because it was written in Olde English Longhand.
Like good detectives looking for clues to the translation we checked things that looked similar, things that made sense and used a good dose of guesswork.
That got us half way, but we still had confusing combination of names and words in play.
Mark eventually found the key. It turned out that when they wrote “al” it looked like an “a” with a curlicue at the back end and the word was “Go—ersa”. I knew that there was a nearby village called Gomersal. That led to an idea of the purpose which led to several key translations.
So, it turns out that in 1600 each English village and its surroundings belonged to a “Parish” centered on the local Church of England. Each Parish was controlled by the local ChurchWarden and a Board that included an “Overseer of the Poor” who controlled the amount of charity that the church paid out in the Parish. Titus, his wife and family had been on “welfare” in Gomersal and wanted to move to a nearby village, Tong, but to do so, the “Overseer of the Poor” in Tong had to be contacted by the Overseer in Gomersall and an agreement made. The document then had to be signed off by the two Churchwardens and two Justices of the Peace. Talk about red tape!!! This document is the official release.
Note that the document uses the old way of dating – “in the twenty-third day of January in the sixth year of the reign of Queen Anne”
NOW – see if you can decipher it. The annotated text follows, so try to solve it before you scroll too far.
It begins "We whose names are here unto subscribed...."
. So how did it go?
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So how did it go?
Here is the same document with the translation interspersed under the original text
