Those of us churched with the traditional 1611 King James translation of the Bible know how words change their meaning; but we grew up with that Book and the meanings of those old words are second nature to us. It is sometimes jarring to realize that, for people who were raised on a more modern translation, or people who never went to church, the verses of the KJV are a foreign language and often misunderstood. However, sometimes it doesn't take 450 years for some words to change meanings, for the familiar to become unfamiliar.

Our language today has evolved somewhat from the language of Americans in the nineteenth century--the language of slaves and slaveholders, the language of Civil War soldiers and Reconstruction freedpeople. Folks like genealogists and historians who do a lot of primary research in that century learn a vocabulary that can be quite puzzling to modern eyes and ears.

I was reminded of this yesterday when reading the electronic book by Paul Jennings, _A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison_ at University of North Carolina's website,"Documenting the American South," at
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jennings/jennings.html

The book reproduces an image of a note written by Daniel Webster in 1847, but the e-book transcriber found one of the words illegible: "I have paid $120 for the freedom of Paul Jennings--He agrees to work out the sum, at 8 dollars a month, to be [illegible] with board, clothes + washing . . . ."

See the image at the bottom of this post.

Even Jennings' friend who wrote the preface to Jennings' book in 1865 mis-transcribed the word as "furnished." That is the correct meaning but not the correct word. The word is "found." The sentence should read, "He agrees to work out the sum, at 8 dollars a month, to be found with board, clothes + washing . . . ." In 1847 the verb "to find" usually meant the same thing we mean by the word today (to discover), but it had another meaning usually confined to labor contracts or similar agreements. In these special cases, "find" could mean furnish, supply, or provide.

Here is an 1838 example from a slave owner's agreement with an overseer: "Am to give him $250 which is to be infull for his services without finding him any provisions, but am to grind his bread Corn free of toll." In 1839 the same employer negotiated different terms with the same overseer: "Am to give him $200 and to find him 50 bush Corn and 400 lb Pork."

You may encounter "find" meaning "provide" in some sharecropping or labor agreements after Emancipation. Word use continued to evolve, and by the twentieth century that meaning was becoming obsolete and most contracts in which the employer providing supplies used the word "furnish." (In twentieth century Georgia such agreements were usually called "furnishing contracts.")

When encountering odd words or words that seem to be used in an unusual way, it helps to have access to a large dictionary that includes obscure and obsolete meanings.