According to Peter Webster Jackson (2001), OKSL may have been the language used by a deaf boy described by 17th century British writer Samuel Pepys in his Diaries.
[1][page needed] Pepys was dining with his friend Sir George Downing on 9 November 1666, when the deaf servant had a conversation in sign language with his master, which included news of the Great Fire of London.
Downing had been to school near Maidstone in Kent, where he lived in a community where congenital deafness was widespread.
[2][page needed] As settlers of the Martha's Vineyard communities of Tisbury and Chilmark in Massachusetts migrated from the Kentish Weald, Nora Groce (1985) speculates that OKSL may be the origin of Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, which is, in turn, one of the precursors of American Sign Language (ASL).
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