§ 1419 [Handwriting Comparison for Ancient Documents]

When someone needs to prove that a very old document is real, the rules are a little more flexible. For documents older than 30 years, a handwriting comparison can be made using other old documents that people have treated as genuine over the years.

Normally, courts require strict proof that a sample document is authentic before using it for comparison. But with old documents, if people who had a reason to care about the document's authenticity treated it as real, that is good enough to use it as a comparison sample. This makes sense because very old documents are harder to verify using modern methods.