Hey everyone, so for my totally unrelated internship I was asked to decipher a couple of dispatches that were sent by Lieutenant Governor William Gooch to London. The reason I am looking for this is because we are looking for a letter in which Gooch named Orange County (Virginia) after William IV, Prince of Orange
I am wondering this because I can't decipher the entire letter, but I do notice that there seem to be a lot of similarities in the capitalized/larger words such as: George, fifteen shillings, We have, Beginning, With all, To have hold, To be held, Yielding, Paying, Provided.
Any help is appreciated, especially about deciphering the letters, but anything about those two people or Orange County is appreciated as well.
These are the letters: https://imgur.com/a/bOhQy
These are all different letters. They're not quite "letters" as we'd think of them today--more like papal bulls or executive orders. As such, there's a lot of formulaic bits of them. All of these letters begin (as far as I can tell) with "George, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France, Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc. To all whom these presents may come, greeting." This is a strong indicator that these are official documents--and as such, written out by professional scribes, leading to the similarities you notice.
One easy way to check to make sure that they're different is to look at the endings of all of them, where they're all dated. The first one is dated 1724, the second 1725, the third 1722 ("eighth year of his reign" which started 1714) and the fourth 1747.
The reason I want to know whether these are identical letters or similar, but not identical, letters is because I don't want to try to decipher 4 letters while I could just do one instead.