Then, in 1971, the original 1826 court record was discovered in the basement of the County Jail in Norwich, New York. In the court record, Joseph confessed that he had been offering his services as a seer for the last three years, which put his money-digging activities from 1823 to 1826. To put it another way, Joseph was operating as a con artist, during the same time he would later claim he was preparing himself to be worthy of receiving the gold plates that an angel had told him lay buried near his home. ix
