Rare US independence declaration found in UK archive

A rare parchment copy of the US Declaration of Independence found at a British archive among the papers of an aristocrat who supported the rebels has been authenticated, officials said.

The manuscript was discovered last year at the West Sussex Record Office in the southern English city of Chichester by a team of researchers led by two Harvard University academics.

Tests supported the hypothesis that it was produced in the 1780s, West Sussex County Council said earlier this week -- just a few years after the declaration itself was issued in 1776.

The document "is the only other contemporary manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence on parchment apart from the signed copy at the National Archives in Washington DC," known as the Matlack Declaration, a council statement said earlier this week.

There are other printed parchment copies and handwritten copies on paper but the Sussex Declaration, as it has been dubbed, and the Matlack Declaration in Washington are the only two known ceremonial parchment copies of the declaration.

Multi-spectral imaging of the document "revealed a date beneath an erasure on the document" which reads either "July 4, 178" or July 4, 179", researchers said.

The fourth digit for the year may have been permanently erased.

The Harvard Gazette said the clerk drawing up the document was "inexperienced" as the date was written on a slight downward slant and the year of the production of the document was used rather than the year in which the declaration was enacted.