The Jacob Leisler Institute and the Journey of a Young Historian

Recently at the Jacob Leisler Institute, I was given a burned document dating back to the late 17th century that was caught in the fire of a building and just barely made it out. These documents are already extremely difficult to transcribe in the first place with much of the old english being very different from our present day version of the language, but the burn marks on the document made many of the words very difficult to read if not impossible altogether. In order to try and do my best to interpret the document, I tried several tricks that may have shown the burned words a little more clearly such as holding the document against the sunlight with the hopes that it would illuminate the letters. Although this did have a little success, it did not show nearly enough words to properly interpret the document and makes it very fragile in the use of interpreting history. Just one small error in interpreting a word from what it actually is could change the entire meaning of the document and, if this mistake is made, the consequences of doing so could be great. So, unfortunately, unless we were to find some sort of technique in the future that may allow us to better understand documents such as this that have gone through severe damage or we can find a copy of this document somewhere, this document seems to be very difficult in the use of history. However, we are still able to have access to many documents dating back to this time which allows us to adapt to these difficulties. But, as stated before, even these documents are very difficult to interpret with the language being very different from ours and with the documents starting to age, the text begins to decay with the paper itself. One thing that has made this issue very easy to conquer for myself though has been the use of copiers and the ability they have to make the text very dark in its color so that way it is much clearer for the use of the historian. As for the issue of interpreting the words themselves based on their language, I have found it helpful to document symbols and acronyms that have constantly appeared throughout several texts to determine what they mean. For example, one of the first words I regularly encountered in these documents was the use of “Excly”. After following the pattern of seeing this word appear when referencing a high ranking individual or the King of England himself, I was able to determine this acronym was short for “Excellency”. Many other words such as these constantly continued to appear and documenting them has made my job as a historian much easier to try and transcribe these documents.With the privilege to be an intern at the Jacob Leisler Institute, I have now come into first contact with a lot of the difficulties that historians face when trying to look back on history. Although the transcribing of these documents was definitely the most challenging of all these obstacles, there were many other problems that I faced at the Institute, but it would take a whole day to go into depth on each and every single one. However, these difficulties should not be a reason for people to give up on history, but rather as a sort of motivation for people to keep on striving. It’s historians who do this work that shape how we view history in our classrooms and when we go to historical sites around the world, and this is why it makes it so important to take the challenge head-on and strive to do nothing but the best for ourselves and for the world around us as well.