Reading a 1790s deed: the long s, the thorn and the superscript
July 2026 · 3 min read
The deed that has occupied my evenings this month is a clerk’s copy from the 1790s, written into a county deed book a few weeks after the original was signed. That matters: I am not reading the seller’s handwriting but a professional copyist’s, which is both easier (the hand is regular) and harder (the abbreviations are the clerk’s habits, not the family’s). The page is a dense block of brown ink with almost no punctuation.
Three features of the hand took most of my time. The first is the long s, which looks almost exactly like an f without the crossbar and appears wherever an s begins or sits inside a word; “possession” comes out looking like poffeffion, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The second is the thorn, a leftover letter that looks like a y and stands for th, so what appears to be “ye” is simply “the”, and “yt” is “that”. The third is the clerk’s habit of abbreviating with superscript letters: a small d floating above “s” means “said”, “wch” is “which”, and “afsd” is “aforesaid”, which appears in nearly every line.
The method that finally worked was to build an alphabet for this particular clerk before trying to read the content. Deeds are formulaic, so I knew certain words had to be there: the opening “This Indenture”, the phrase “Witnesseth”, the month name near the top, and “In Witness whereof” near the end. I found those, copied each letter they contained into a table, and used the table to decode the words I did not know. Within an hour I had most of the alphabet; the capitals took another evening because clerks of that period liked flourishes that turn an L into something resembling a sailing ship.
What the deed actually says is less dramatic than the decoding. It records a sale of a tract of land described by metes and bounds: starting at a marked white oak, running a given number of poles at a given compass bearing to a stake, and so on around the parcel back to the start. It names the consideration paid, in a mix of money and goods, and at the end the seller’s wife releases her dower right, which is the only place in the whole document where she appears. That single line is why I wanted to read it.
I transcribe line by line, keeping the original line breaks and spelling, and put anything I am unsure of in square brackets. The brackets are honest. A clean transcription with no brackets usually means I have guessed somewhere and hidden it.