One thing that annoyed me about the Ohio Cipher was that the quality of the newsprint scan of the original 3rd July 1916 article was simply terrible.
Yes, it really was exactly that bad. Having said that, the version of the same cipher in the follow-up 7th July 1916 article was, comparatively speaking, in excellent shape:
But… which was the correct version of the cryptogram? What’s worse, both of these differed again from the one that ended up in the Futility Closet nearly a century later. So will the real Ohio Cipher now please stand up, please stand up? (…so that we can give it a proper go at solving it, at least partially).
Anyway, a little earlier this year I had a good idea as to how to resolve this: why not find a list of newspaper archives that might possible hold a physical copy of the Lima Times-Democrat from that particular day (3rd July 1916), and see if I could get a fresh scan of it from there? There must, I reasoned, surely be more than a single extant copy of that particular edition, and in all probability they can’t all be as bad as the online one I’d been working with, surely?!?
Hence I contacted the Ohio Historical Society to see if they had a list of such archives, and yesterday got an unexpectedly positive response from this via Tom Rieder of the Ohio History Connection, Columbus OH. He very kindly scanned two different copies of the same article and sent them through to me (they’re at higher resolution than they appear within the blog post body, so feel free to click through to them in all their fuzzy monochromatic glory):-
So, thanks to Tom Rieder’s help, I think we can now say with a reasonable amount of certainty that the Ohio Cipher’s ciphertext was similar but not quite identical to the second version given above, and should read:-
Was nvlvaft by aakat txpxsck upbk txphn ohay ybtx cpt mxhg wae sxfp zavfz ack there first txlk week wayx za with thx
What does this mean? Here we go (at last)… 🙂
If you try to read this off the page as a normal monoalphabetic cipher, the fact that “txp” occurs twice and “tx” occurs four times (and that “TH” is the most common letter-pair in English) would probably make you strongly suspect that “txp” = “THE”. Further you’d probably like to hazard a guess at this point that “txlk” = “THIS” and that “ybtx” = “WITH”. (“aakat” I don’t believe is correct, so let’s skip past that that for the moment.)
But… this approach simply doesn’t work. Even putting only the cipher-like words into CryptoCrack as a patristocrat yields gibberish-like plaintext (such as “fmomewseenesstaturngainstalfpleddistrasktlycebutwahemwhernstoncedthe”, which isn’t particularly close to anything anyone apart from a statistical linguist might describe as a normal language).
There also seems to be some kind of odd-even pattern to the letters, in that ZA appears three times all on even letter boundaries. So my suspicion is that what we’re looking at here is something like a Frankenmixture of plaintext and Polybius ciphertext (but indexed with letters rather than numbers), i.e. with (say) [ A P S U X ] on one side and [ T H K M Z ] across the top, plus other stuff (such as spelling mistakes, transmission errors and possibly extra letters coded as themselves) to confuse the picture. *sigh*
I’m sorry if that’s not as robust a decryption-style reading as you’d like to be getting from Cipher Mysteries, but it is what it is, and please feel entirely free to see if you can do better yourself, ain’t nothin’ stoppin’ ya. 🙂
Yes, we’re back in Ohio again, for the third post in a row. Bear with me, though, because I think you’ll quite like the ride… 🙂
The 28th June 1916 evening edition of the Lima Times-Democrat has a dramatic story about a Western Ohio Railway ticket agent being robbed. My guess is that this is the incident that the Ohio Cipher was to do with, although quite how (or why) is another matter entirely. This is what it said:-
BOLD ROBBER MAKES GET-A-WAY WITH W. O. CASH BOX
Follows Ticket Agent Shaw to Safe and Secures $265.
Walks Calmly Out of Office and Disappears on Elisabeth Street.
Local police so far have been unable get any trace of the bold robber who held up Harvey Shaw, ticket agent of the Western Ohio railroad, last night, and made away with the contents of the cash drawer, which contained $265. Although a good description of the thief was given [to] the police department, a careful search of the city has failed to reveal the fugitive.
So carefully was the robbery perpetrated, that not even the numerous employes and persons waiting for the last train were aware of the trouble, until Shaw ran out the front door of the station shortly after the departure of the thief and gave the alarm.
Persons who saw the man walk out of the station state that he did not seem to hurry. He went west on Market until he reached Elizabeth street and turned south. Immediately after the alarm pedestrians and persons in the waiting room assisted in searching for the thief in the rear of the Wheeler block. Police who responded to the call searched all the alleys and lots in the neighbourhood, but their efforts were unsuccessful.
According to Shaw he checked up the receipts of the day about 11:20 p.m. and placing the money in a tin box started downstairs to the basement where the safe is located. He claims that he was unaware that he was being followed until he heard footsteps behind him. On looking around he was confronted by a well-dressed stranger, who had been sitting in the waiting room.
The stranger told him not to make any out-cry and ordered that he continue on his way to the basement, using a large revolver to convince him that he meant business.
Shaw complied with the request, the thief following with the revolver pressed against the agent’s back.
When they reached the safe, Shaw was ordered to set the cash box down. The robber held his revolver in his right hand and transferred the cash to his pockets with his left hand. While performing the operation he did not take his eyes off the agent.
As the eyes of the thief were trailed along the barrel of the gun he was unable to see the denomination of the coins and paper money. When his fingers touched a coin that, from the size, appeared to be a penny, he remarked, “What kind of small change is this?” Without taking his eyes off the agent, he brought his hand up within range of his vision and seeing that it was a $5 gold piece he placed the remainder of the money in his pocket. With a curt order to Shaw to remain quiet, he backed up the stairway and walked quietly out of the door.
From the quiet and systematic manner in which the holdup was perpetrated, police are of the opinion that it was the work of a professional. However, it is clear that the stranger in some manner was informed as the locality of the safe and condition that would confront him in pulling the job. A description of the fugitive was sent to police departments of surrounding cities and towns.
Well! They don’t write ’em like that any more, do they? 😉
Update: according to a newspaper search on ancestry.com, the same robbery story was covered in the Marion Daily Star (28th June 1916), the Sandusky Star Journal (28th June 1916) and the Lancaster Daily Gazette (29th June 1916), but so far I have found coverage of the mysterious cipher follow-up only in the Lima Times-Democrat. Still, lots to check just yet…
Firstly, while looking for more mentions of the story in other 1916 Ohio newspapers, I stumbled across an article in the 4th July 1916 edition of the Coshocton Morning Tribune, which said:-
The Eastern Puzzlers League, organized in 1883 for the construction, solving and exploitation of enigmas, met here [Warren, OH] today for its semi-annual convention.
As I understand it, the Eastern Puzzlers League grew into the National Puzzlers League, whose magazine “Enigma” was where the cryptogram later appeared. Might the Ohio Cipher have therefore been planted in an Ohio paper by a convention attendee simply for a bit of fun? If so, the NPL version of the ciphertext would probably be the correct one, rather than the one in the Lima Times-Democrat. All the same, Ohio is a big place, and Warren is the opposite side to Lima… so all this might just be a coincidence. Or perhaps the Ohio Cipher was the talk of the convention, and so it was natural to write it up in the newsletter?
Secondly, the National Puzzlers League version of the story says “The police department of Lima, O., is greatly puzzled over a cryptic message received in connection with the robbery of a Western Ohio ticket agent.” At first, I thought that “Western Ohio” was a rather imprecise description (as somebody once said, ‘Ohio is a big place’), until I realized that this was a reference to a railway.
Launched in 1903, the Western Ohio Railway was an electric railway based in Lima, known as the “Lima Route”. It was an interurban railway that had many stops around Lima, where its fierce competitor was Ohio Electric. 1916 arguably was during its golden age: the Railway collapsed in 1932, one of the many smaller railways to fail during the Great Depression.
Hence it seems likely that if the Ohio Cipher is genuine (and that the National Puzzlers League account is also essentially correct), it was indeed linked with an incident in Lima, OH. However, I haven’t been able to find any historical archives connected with Western Ohio Railway (reformed in 1928 as “Western Ohio Railway & Power Co”) at all… maybe there aren’t any to be found. If there is something to be found, I suspect it will be in court or police records.
Finally: “WAS NVKVAFT BY AAKAT TXPXSCK UPBK TXPHN OHAY YBTX CPT MXHG WAE SXFP ZAVFZ ACK THERE FIRST TXLK WEEK WAYX ZA WITH THX” looks to me to be a bit of an unusual ciphertext, in that it seems to mix up both enciphered and unenciphered words.
What’s more, various features of the enciphered words hint at a kind of verbose or Polybius square cipher:-
* X appears eight times, always on an even position inside a word
* T appears seven times, always on an odd position inside a word
What is going on here? I really don’t believe this is any kind of simple substitution cipher, but rather something more like the WW2 “Slidex” cipher which similarly mixed enciphered and unenciphered text. Might parts of it be some kind of low-level private telegraphic code?
Tipping my (virtual) hat frenetically in the direction of Zodiac Killer Cipher-meister Dave Oranchak yet again, it’s time to reveal one of the very few cipher mysteries from Ohio. (Might it be the only one? Let me know if it isn’t!)
Dave had found this story mentioned on the consistently curious (in a nice way) Futility Closet website, which itself had presumably found it from a 1916 edition of “Enigma”, the magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League (later reprinted here).
“The police department of Lima, O., is greatly puzzled over a cryptic message received in connection with the robbery of a Western Ohio ticket agent. Here it is: WAS NVKVAFT BY AAKAT TXPXSCK UPBK TXPHN OHAY YBTX CPT MXHG WAE SXFP ZAV FZ ACK THERE FIRST TXLK WEEK WAYZA WITH THX.”
As normal with such half-remembered stories, there’s no mention of anything specific that might actually help us track it down. But I decided to have a look anyway: and quickly found two mentions of it in the Lima Times-Democrat newspaper. The original mention was on the 3rd July 1916 (though the scan of it is barely readable)…
i.e.
“At the request of a citizen of …… (we present?) a note written in cypher. As it is of the utmost importance that the contents of the note be ascertained. Any suggestions by readers of this paper which will …. assist in learning …. of the note will be … appreciated. The note is as follows: …”
…while there was a follow-up mention on the 7th July 1916 with a (probably spurious) guess as to the alphabet…
So the NPL transcript was nearly correct, except that it had split “ZAVFZ” into “ZAV FZ” (you can just about make out “zavfz” on the original Lima Times-Democrat report) and merged “WAYX ZA” to “WAYZA”. So, the correct “Ohio cipher” ciphertext should be:
WAS NVKAFT BY AAKAT TXPXSCK UPBK TXPHN OHAY YBTX CPT MXHG WAE SXFP ZAVFZ ACK THERE FIRST TXLK WEEK WAYX ZA WITH THX
Well… given that we still don’t know the exact town or date of the incident, and the Enigma retelling of the story seems not to have quite matched what the local newspaper actually said (e.g. it was reported by a “citizen”), we’re still left with plenty of mysteries. Perhaps other newspaper reports from the time will reveal more of the story… anyone who wants to take this on, please be my guest!
All the same, to me the ciphertext does look exactly like the kind of ad hoc partially-improvised agony column ciphers Tony Gaffney used to eat for breakfast, so maybe he’ll see straight through this particular visual trick and crack it quicker than you can say “vividly ovoviviparous”… 😉
Given that the first two well-attested full-scale metal-clad airships (both by David Schwartz and industrialist Carl Berg) were in Russia and Prussia in the 1890s, it should be no great surprise if an American concern built its own similar airship at about the same time.
But entrepreneurs are opportunists; opportunity needs timing; and timing is everything. So what was it about the 1890s and airships? Why was the timing so special?
Affordable Aluminium
In my first post that touched on the 1897 Airship “Flap”, I mentioned that aluminium was the wonder-metal of the second half of the 19th century: but, to be fair, that wasn’t quite the whole story. Though I was correct to say that aluminium had gone into industrial production in 1856, it stayed horribly expensive for decades.
In fact, it wasn’t until 1886 when chemist Charles Martin Hall and his sister Julia discovered (while experimenting “in a shed attached to the family home in Oberlin, Ohio”) how to produce aluminium much more cheaply via electrolysis. The French chemist Paul T. Héroult discovered the same process at around the same time. Ever since, aluminium production has been dominated by the Hall-Héroult Process.
To exploit this new industrial process, Hall initially tried to get backing from investors in Ohio and New York, but without success. Eventually Hall succeeding in bringing together a group of backers including Captain Alfred E. Hunt (a metallurgist whose independent lab served the steel industry) and Arthur Vining Davis; who all on Thanksgiving Day 1888 founded a company called the Pittsburgh Reduction Company.
By 1890, the company had already received an initial investment from the famous Pittsburgh banking family the Mellons: in fact, the Mellons’ shareholding later grew to a third of the whole stock.
By 1891, the company had moved from a pilot site on Smallman Street to much bigger premises in New Kensington, where it started to form aluminium ingots and prefabricated products; and by 1895, it was producing aluminum cookware (such as rust-free kettles). Aluminium frames for bicycles were another big growth area during the 1890s.
Flying machines subsequently proved a focus as well: in 1903, the Wright Brothers’ engine block and crankcase were both made of Pittsburgh Reduction Company aluminium. The company’s aerospace alloy 2017-T4 (developed in 1916) was used for the US Navy’s rigid airship USS Shenandoah.
In 1925, the company listed on the New York Curb Exchange as “Aluminum Company of America”: but you probably have seen the shortened form of its name, still thriving a century later – Alcoa.
Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1896
For any company or concern in the US looking to make an aluminium airship gondola in 1896 (in time for the airship “flap” in 1897), I think the Pittsburgh Reduction Company was highly likely to have been its supplier. A 290-page book published by the PRC in 1898 (“Aluminum and aluminum alloys in the form of ingots, castings, bars, plates [etc.] (Myers & Shinkle co., printers, 1898)”) describes (in, ummm, riveting detail) just about every aspect (and industrial use) imaginable of aluminium and various aluminium alloys.
If an early customer had – as I suspect – bought a sizeable amount of aluminium from the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1896, I think there’s a good chance that a trace of that 1896 transaction remains in the 98 linear feet (191 boxes) of company archives that still exist. These are held by the Heinz History Center, located at 1212 Smallman St, Pittsburgh: “Aluminum Company of America Records, 1857-1992 (bulk 1900-1965), MSS #282, Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center“.
Personally, the two sections I’d be most interested in:
Even though I’ve covered Project Helios’ fall to Earth [sorry!] in previous posts (much supported by David DeVorkin’s detailed account in “Race to the Stratosphere”), because of its close links to Project Mogul there are also external mentions of Helios in (for example) Albert Crary’s journal.
Recapping: even though Project Helios’ maiden manned balloon flight to the stratosphere was planned for the 21st June 1947 (the summer solstice), the overall administration of the project collapsed during the Spring, before finally being canned in May 1947. Part of the challenge was that Helios was intended to be a military-scientific platform, and the collaborating groups (who hoped to run their experiments on Helios) all had different practical needs and political priorities.
In this post, I’ll try to look at Project Helios through a Project Mogul lens (if that makes sense).
Project Mogul
Project Mogul, a top secret Army-funded project to put devices high up in the atmosphere to listen for the sound of Russian atomic tests, was one of these collaborating parties: and, as of February 1947, was still expecting Helios to run. And so we see Crary’s journal entry for 4-5-6 Feb 1947 in Oakhurst:
Went over possible experiments in ‘Helios’ balloon June with [Dr Jim] Peoples.
The NYU team’s “Technical Report No. 1” (Appendix 13 in the Roswell Report) mentions that Project Mogul moved from serial balloon linkage (which gave balloon chains taller than the Seattle Space Needle) to the Project Helios parallel cluster (introduced by Jean Piccard, though not actually invented by him):
Figures 31 and 36 show the two methods used to group the balloons in clusters. Figure 31 shows the linear array borrowed from cosmic ray flight techniques; figure 36 shows the modified “Helios Cluster” in which lines from the balloons are joined at a central ring at the top of the load line.
The Helios cluster was by far the easier to handle because of the simpler rigging and the reduced launching strains.
Figure 36 shows the Helios cluster arrangement the Mogul team introduced with Flight #7 (2nd July 1947) (note that I’ve only included the topmost section of the payload):
Here you can see two Helios clusters, with the top (“lifter assembly”) 4-balloon cluster separated from the main 16-balloon cluster. When the balloon reached a specified height (35,000 feet), a switch in the separator would blow a small charge, splitting the lifter balloons off from the main body. Using small charges to release balloons within a cluster was one of Jean Piccard’s innovations – initially, this horrified other balloonists, but many changed their minds once they saw it working successfully for Piccard.
Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR
It seems hugely likely to me that the person who introduced the Helios cluster mechanism to the NYU Project Mogul team was Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR, of NAS Lakehurst, NJ. A Princeton graduate and very skilled free balloonist (according to J. Gordon Vaeth, “They Sailed the Skies”, Epilogue), Smith had been working for Tex Settle on Project Helios at General Mills in Minnesota, and then in the May 1947 reorganisation had been made Scientific Coordinator by Capt Hutchinson (“The Navy still wished to perform missile drops from unmanned clusters, so to this end – and only because of this end – Helios remained an active project” – DeVorkin, p.286).
It therefore seems hugely likely to me that the “Lt Smith NYU” mentioned in Crary’s journal as arriving in Alamogordo for Project Mogul’s “Alamogordo II” balloon expedition phase was indeed Lt. Harris F. Smith.
I also found evidence that at least one unmanned missile drop from Helios clusters was carried out in September 1947 (from an interview with George Hoover).
The C-54 Flights
According to Capt. Albert Trakowski, the Project Mogul team had access to a Douglas C-54 Skymaster in Fort Dix, New Jersey: this was not too far from where most of the (NYU) project team was based.
Hence it seems likely to me that Smith travelled down with the rest of the Mogul team on 28th June 1947 on the team’s allocated C-54 (their research was funded by the US Army).
“Several UFO authors claim that the wreckage, and possibly alien bodies as well, were secretly flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio for analysis. By coincidence, Moore says he and the rest of the NYU balloon crew stayed over at Wright Field the evening of July 8, 1947, en route back to New Jersey, just as the Roswell story was breaking. Moore says they first learned of the incident while in Dayton, and figured that it was probably caused by one of their recent polyethylene balloon flights.”
I really wish I had access to the passenger manifests for these C-54 flights, particularly the 28th June 1947 flight. However, given the US Army’s record retention policies, it seems – unless you know better? – highly unlikely that these passenger manifests survived even ten years.
Where next?
As always, a perfectly reasonable question is now: where should I be looking next? In the same way that Project Helios was funded by the US Navy’s Office for Naval Research (ONR), Project Mogul was funded by the US Army’s Air Materiel Command (AMC). AMC was formed in 9th March 1946 out of various predecessor commands (e.g. AAF Technical Service Command (ATSC), 1st July 1945), and was largely run out of Wright Field (Dayton, Ohio).
Central decimal correspondence, 1916-49 (1,774 ft.).
Research and development project contract files, 1921-51 (3,438 ft.).
Microfilm copy of research and development technical reports, 1928-51 (400 rolls)
However, for Project Mogul’s constant-level balloon R&D we already know the contract number (W28-099-ac-241), as well as its Technical Report #1 (which amply covers the time period we’re interested in). So unless there’s something unexpected in “Central decimal correspondence, 1916-1949”, I’m not hugely optimistic that there will be anything useful in these Air Force files.
The occasional gentle thunk sound of a book landing on my doormat has of late been replaced by a near-continuous clunking sound, as my second hand book addiction has changed gears. It feels like I now know just about everything anyone sensible would eer want to know about Unit 731, Fu-go balloons, the Roswell Incident, War in the Pacific, Project Helios, Project Mogul, Piccard family minutiae, etc etc. And still books keep arriving.
Anyway, here’s a brief 16x-speed scan of what I’ve been working my way through in the last few days.
Jeannette Ridlon Piccard
I was very pleased to find a biography of Jean Felix Piccard’s wife Jeannette Ridlon Picard online. This was Sheryl K. Hill’s (2009) in-depth (and yet very readable) dissertation “ ‘Until I Have Won’ Vestiges of Coverture and the Invisibility of Women in the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Jeannette Ridlon Piccard“.
The central primary source that Hill relied upon was the The Piccard Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., that had been donated to the LOC by Jeannette Piccard, and which you may (possibly) recall being mentioned here previously.
And so it is that Hill seems to have read all the correspondence from all the boxes I was most interested in, which hopefully has saved me an awful lot of time and effort. 🙂
In the section “Stratospheric Flight Déjà vu: Helios Project” (pp. 249-252), Hill briefly tells the story of how Project Helios unwound (from Jeannette’s point of view) [p. 250]:
However, within months it was evident the Navy Department was taking over the project, now classified “confidential: project number 9-U-J,” and known as “Free Balloon Research Laboratory.” Part “B-1a” specified the contractor “shall design, construct, test and fly the stratosphere balloon specified in the contract with a crew approved by the Navy.” The December 1946 news release indicated the ONR had “entered into a contract with the General Mills Aeronautical Research Laboratory for the construction of a special cluster-type balloon and gondola to be used for scientific studies in the higher altitudes…The ascent itself [was] planned for mid-June [1947] from the Naval Air Station at Ottumwa, Iowa…” The news release indicated the “services” of Jean Piccard were “under contract,” but no mention was made of Jeannette’s role as pilot.
It didn’t take too long before the ONR pulled the money rug from under the whole project [p. 251]:
Although Jean remained optimistic that a clustered-balloon flight could be made, the Navy pulled its financial support in June 1947, stating “operational tests of the prototype balloons which were to be used in a cluster to form a lifting medium for project Helios have clearly demonstrated that a piloted flight cannot be accomplished this year.” Jean wrote his fellow scientific collaborators that he would do “all…possible…to organize a stratosphere flight at the earliest possible date…” “I shall not leave you stranded,” he stated, “but I shall make a serious effort to get other sponsorship.”
And that, as far as the Piccards seem to have been concerned with Project Helios, was that: despite their (literally) high hopes, they never did manage to reach the stratosphere together. For me, the #1 unanswered question was whether they secretly planned to inaugurate the 20-Mile High Club? Hill doesn’t say, so I guess we’ll never know.
Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR
So it seems that we are left with a small (but niggling) gap in the ballooning timeline between the end of Project Helios (June 1947) and the start of Project Skyhook (where the first balloon was launched on 25th September 1947). Note that there seems to be no record of “Project 9-U-J” anywhere: in NARA, just about everything with “9-U-J” turns out to be an OCR error. So for now I’m running with the idea that 9-U-J was just an internal ONR reference for Project Helios, rather than some other top secret project name.
According to Craig Ryan (The Pre-Astronauts, p.63), the ONR replaced Jeannette Piccard as pilot with “balloonist and airshipman Lt. Harris F. Smith USNR”. I’m pretty sure this is the same “Lt. Smith from Navy NYU” who arrived at Alamogordo on 28th June 1947, as noted in Albert Crary’s logbook, because this would help explain how the Project Mogul team moved from serial linkage between balloons to using a Project Helios (parallel) cluster mounting around this time:
Balloon expedition personnel arrived Saturday evening – Peoples, Trakowski, Mears, Ireland, Olsen, Moulton, Alden from AMS and Moore, Schneider, Hackman, Smith, Hazzard, 2 others and a Lt Smith from Navy NYU.
According to Fold3, Harris F. Smith had service number 4041150, and in 1942 was stationed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, NJ. And according to the blurb for J. Gordon Vaeth’s (2005) “They Sailed The Skies” (my copy will arrive from America in a few weeks’ time, *sigh*), it was Harris F. Smith and William J. Gunther at Lakehurst who revived US Navy ballooning after WWII.
Because Ancestry’s account doesn’t include access to Fold3’s “Premium Features” (or indeed to Newspapers.com’s “Premium Features”), my best current guess is that this was Harris F. Smith born 4th September 1919 in Newark, NJ, died 26th Jan 2013 in New Jersey.
The 1947 Manned Balloon Incident
Now that I have a copy of Craig Ryan’s “The Pre-Astronauts”, I’m able to see the full text (and reference) for the 1947 manned balloon incident (pp. 20-21) I mentioned before:
One of the first postwar manned balloon flights sponsored by the military was launched from the Tularosa Basin in 1947 with the intent of crossing the Rockies and landing somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately, the entire flight’s supply of ballast was expended in the crossing of the Sacramento range to the east of Alamogordo and the balloon’s journey ended just short of Roswell. A potential embarrassment, the aborted continental crossing was kept quiet and the pilot’s name never released. “We were naive as hell,” explained one of the NYU scientists.
Craig Ryan’s notes for this chapter gives the source of this story as an interview with Duke Gildenberg, who had worked in the NYU team in 1947, and then after graduation worked at Holloman AFB (which, prior to late 1947, was Alamogordo AAFB) from 1951 to 1981. Yet there are two curious things about this story. Firstly, the first manned polyethylene balloon flight on record was Charles B. Moore in 3rd November 1949 in Minneapolis. And secondly, even though Gildenberg was interviewed many times about the events of 1947 (four years before he started at Holloman), the interview with Gildenberg in Ryan’s book is the only place I’ve seen this incident mentioned anywhere.
Hence I’m currently trying to work out who that unfortunate balloonist was. It seems entirely possible that it was Lt. Harris F. Smith, but – as Gildenberg says – the flight was “a potential embarrassment”, and “was kept quiet”. So I’m guessing it will take a fair bit of work to retrieve it from the archival maw.
Note that this 1947 incident seems entirely separate from the 1959 incident with Dan D. Fulgham and Captain Joe Kittinger (“I also recall an incident involving a manned balloon flight.” etc) that Gildenberg gave testimony about decades later.
Earliest balloon launch date
According to this site, the first plastic balloon tests were on 24th April 1947:
This report describes the first outdoor inflation and flight attempt of a full-size pliofilm balloon on April 24, 1947. Purpose of the test was to obtain data on (1) proposed method of inflation; (2) use of plastic ground cover; (3) behavior of the aerostat at low wind velocity; (4) weighing off the aerostat; (5) rate of ascent; (6) operation of appendix; (7) excess lift for safe take-off without dragging; (5) balloon suspension system; (9) behavior of suspended parachute. Several preconceived opinions on these points were found wanting. A suspension harness failure precluded an actual flight. Nevertheless, the experiment was very revealing, producing information vital to any future attempt. Prior to the first outdoor inflation, a trial inflation had also been successfully made at the balloon loft.
The project update for Helios seems to imply that by May 1947, General Mills’ balloons were going well, though Piccard’s fancy high-altitude gondola-made-for-two was still very much a work in progress:
Between June 1946 and May 1947 the contractor has designed and built the gondola and auxiliary equipment for Helios to within 75% of completion, and has tested and built seven large, and several small balloons made of various plastic films. Through trial and error it has been shown that the present design will fly if the proper plastic film is used. The ideal balloon material has not yet been found, but an adequate plastic film, polyethylene, is now in production and 500 lbs. of this film will be available for assembling in June. A balloon which loses practically no lift in twelve hours has been developed. It has a diameter of 70 feet and a volume of 165,000 cubic feet. By stressing the cellophane-taped seams, it is possible to use a film of lower tensile strength and keep the weight of each cell below 100 pounds.
Presumably the “500lbs of this film [that] was available for assembling in June [1947]” went towards Project Mogul’s relatively small needs. Might the rest have been made into a separate balloon?
GILRUTH: Yes, I remember that Piccard was very, very hurt by the National Geographic that would not give them a dime, and they gave so much to these other people. There was a colonel I can’t remember his name now —
DEVORKIN: Anderson, and a Major Kettener?
GILRUTH: No. There was one that lost his life or almost lost his life. I can’t remember those things anymore.
I was recently reminded that, having got sidetracked by Triantafillos & Stelios Balutis, I hadn’t got round to returning to the Balutz line of inquiry. So here are some notes on Balutz-surnamed people to keep you going. 🙂
By the way, even though you might think that “Balutz” came from the slum district of Bałuty in northern Łódź (the one that became a horrific ghetto in WWII), I actually suspect that the two aren’t connected in any useful way. (But please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!)
Typical of this wider narrative are Miklos Balutz (b. ~1881), Avisalom Balutz (b. ~1880), and Samuel Balutz (b. ~1870), all from Keresd in Hungary (well, in that part of Transylvania which is now in Romania). In the 1905 New York State Census, we can see all three living as boarders in Ellicott Place, Lancaster, Erie: the annotation says that they are a “laborer family“.
For Miklos, you can see him departing Hamburg on 11 Dec 1904, travelling on the S.S. Patricia to New York via Dover and Boulogne, arriving 25th Dec 1904. Similarly, Avisalom travelled from Liverpool to New York, arriving on 6 Nov 1904: and appears to have travelled again from Hamburg to New York (via Cuxhaven, Southampton & Cherbourg), arriving on 14 Sep 1912.
In 1917-1918, we can see “non-declarant alien” Avisalom Joan Balutz (born Feb 1880), now a laborer of 212 Plum Alley, Trumbull County, Ohio, enlisting in the US Army. (Note that there are now plenty of people with the surname Balut in Trumbull County.) Avisalom’s next of kin was a John Balutz of 619 Powersdale Avenue, Youngstown, Ohio. Presumably this was the same John Balutz who was a laborer boarding in 40 Tenth in Youngstown, PA in 1915.
Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, this was broadly around the same time (according to a Wasilchak/Balutz family tree on ancestry.com) that a John Balutz married Anna Truhan (1896-1974) and begat Peter (?), Helen (1917-1942), Nicholas (1919-), Paul (1920-) and Mary Balutz (1922-2011), many of whom were born in Jessup, PA.
On 28 Feb 1923, we hear of an Anna Balutz having surgical treatment in Ellwood Hospital: but on 09 Mar 1917, we also read of Zack Balutz (of Second Street, Ellwood) also being admitted to hospital.
In 1930-1945, John, Anna and Mary Balutz were resident in 120 Palm St, Olyphant, Lackawanna, PA, yielding a further cluster of Balutz archival sightings. On 17 Aug 1931, we see a Helen Balutz, 14, of the same address being involved in an accident (for which she was awarded damages in Nov 1931): the same Helen Balutz died in October 1942 after a short illness.
Are all these John Balutz and Anna Balutz sightings at both ends of Pennsylvania of the same people? (I guess so, but I don’t know for sure.)
More Balutzes from Keresd
Apart from the above, we also have the Julie Lanke Dudrick family tree on ancestry.com to work with. This flags an Atyim (John) Balutz (1861-), father of Zachary (Zaharia) Băluț (check out my diacritics, all you doubters), (b. 1884 in Malincrav, Romania, d. 21 December 1941, Terre Haute, Indiana).
We first see an Atkime Balutz aged 42 from Keresd travelling from Bremen to Baltimore in 1902, to stay with a “Bath, Joh.”.
Though I can’t make out the rest of the destination, it seems he had already made the trip before in 1899. We then see Atyim Balutz arriving in Baltimore, Maryland from Bremen in 1903, heading for Alliance, Ohio.
After that, we see Zachary arrive in New York from Bremen in 1907 on the Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse. In 1920, he was living at 1913 8th Avenue with his brother-in-law Peter (Petru) Saracin and sister Sophy (Zenovia) Saracin. In Ellwood City in 1922, he saved a fellow worker from being gassed.
And… there are about a further 30 or 40 Balutzes, whose immigrant lives simply don’t seem to hit the suburban newspaper chatterati’s radar.
Do You See The Problem Here?
Despite having tried to trace a fair few Balutzes above, there’s actually very little narrative thread to grab hold of and follow. Rather, what we seem to be seeing here is a broad brush of history being dourly daubed, as a whole generation of European immigrants found itself absorbed into and consumed by America’s circa-1900 capitalist machinery.
Some, like John Balutz, married and raised families: but many, perhaps isolated by language / culture / prejudice / racism / whatever, seem to have struggled to find a place for themselves in America beyond simply their narrowly-allocated role as raw muscle.
Within the sphere of genealogical research, this working class invisibility seems to impose a kind of lower bound, below which almost nothing is visible. It makes the tools of genealogy seem impossibly middle class, as if we are trying to understand bats by dissecting cuttlefish. Honestly? Right now, I’m sorry but it feels like we don’t stand the faintest chance here. 🙁
So… Where Next, Nick?
So I’m still interested by the mysterious baccarat school Balutz: unless anyone knows better, he seems likely to me to have been born to Romanian parents around the turn of the century, perhaps in America.
All the same, I have to say that the archival tides don’t seem to be flowing in our direction here. Really, we need the archives to provide us with a lucky break, which – as I hope you already know – only normally happens in Dan Brown novels.
But… let’s just cross our collective fingers and hope for the best, eh?
This is, of the course, the single question that bothered me most after writing my most recent post on the Somerton Man. As you’d expect, almost all the Keans/Keanes I found were Scottish or Irish immigrants: but, sticking out like a sore thumb, there was a single British Joseph Kean with two Lithuanian parents. I set out to figure out what was going on there…
Lithuanian emigration
In the century and more before 1918 (when Lithuania reconstituted itself as a freestanding state), Lithuania was a region controlled by the Russian Empire. Its language (Lithuanian) and religion (almost entirely Roman Catholic) both found themselves being increasingly suppressed, as part of Imperial attempts to damp down its nationalist fervour for independence.
When Lithuanians were hit by a great famine in 1867-1868, the response of many was to emigrate: all in all, it lost 20% of its population to emigration from 1868 to 1900 or so.
In the 19th century, one of the most popular places immigrants looked to move to was Great Britain, a country that allowed pretty much anyone in. (This was to change with the 1905 Aliens Act, which gave control over immigration to the Home Secretary, a dragon-nose-snorting feeling of power that seems to define the kind of populist idiot politician who goes for that job.)
So it should be no surprise that, post-1868, Lithuanian émigré communities started to pop up in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, etc. The fifteenth century Catholic Saint Casimir Jagiellon was their patron saint, so processions, chapels and even churches dedicated to St. Casimir also started to appear (around 1900 or so).
I think this forms the basic historical narrative framework to bear in mind when trying to understand the experience and situation of Lithuanian immigrants 1800-1900.
Basic Facts About Joseph Kean
The genealogical archives give us four basic records relating to Joseph Kean:
His 1922 emigration from Liverpool to Philadelphia on the S.S. Pittsburgh with his wife Frances
His 1926 application for naturalization
The 1930 US Census (he is living in Cuyahoga, Cleveland, OH with wife Frances and son John).
The 1940 US Census (no change there)
They also tell us a few more details about Frances Kean…
born 24th Mar 1896, died 1st Jun 1970 (when her status was “married”)
buried in All Saints Cemetery, Northfield, Summit County, Ohio, USA
…and John Joseph Kean…
born 3rd Nov 1923, died 30 Sep 1969
buried in All Saints Cemetery, Northfield, Summit County, Ohio, USA
Note that there’s also a Joseph F. Kean (who died 7th March 1983) buried in All Saints Cemetery, but there’s no date of birth or picture, so it’s not yet clear to me if this is the same Joseph Kean we’re interested in.
Joseph Kean’s Family
Joseph Kean’s 1922 immigration record from the S.S. Pittsburgh includes a number of telling details:
Though he was born in Britain, his race was “Lithuanian”
Joseph’s occupation was “Miner”, Frances’ was “Housewife”
Their last abode was “Manchester”
They were heading for Cleveland, Ohio.
The next of kin (for both him and his wife Frances) was listed as “Aunt Mrs Majaikas, 59 Lankin Lane, Liverpool” (more on her later)
However, the most interesting thing was a handwritten note that was added to the typed list – “Smirpunas, used for convenience in army“:
So it seems Joseph Kean’s given surname had originally been “Smirpunas” (or something like it), but that he had changed it to “Kean” for convenience in the British Army.
It didn’t take me long to find his parents Jonas and Antonina “Surpunas”, travelling across to Philadelphia at almost exactly the same time (but aboard the White Star Line’s S.S. Haverford), departing Liverpool on 19 Nov 1921.
We can also see miner Jonas Snirpunas (though now from Paeyerus, Russia, and only “48” years old, so obviously it was a very refreshing journey) and Antonina Snirpunas arriving in Philadelphia on 30th November 1921, along with (and here’s a surprise) English-born 17-year-old son William Snirpunas (also a miner). All three’s next of kin is marked as “Cousin Vincent Majackis, of 59 Limekiln Lane, Liverpool”.
From this we can tell that in 1921, Jonas Snirpunas was a Lithuanian-born miner (either 48 or 52, while his Lithuanian-born wife Antonina was 52), who had been living in 91 Station Road, Haydock St Helens. Which, according to Google Maps, now looks like this:
Knowing that his parents had been living in Haydock St Helens then made it easy to find Joseph Kean’s British WWI records. Private Joseph Kean 428778 of the Labouring Corps was discharged with a military pension on 6th March 1919 because of “neurasthenia” (“20%” of which was caused by military service). His address was “91 Station Road, Haydock St Helens”.
It seems that this (eight shillings a week) pension ceased on 24/5/1921, and that the paperwork was “transferred to Foreign & Colonial 5/7/[19]22”. My guess (and it’s only a guess) would be that the end of his military pension in May 1921 may have helped trigger Joseph’s emigration to America later that same year.
Regardless, Joseph’s 1927 petition for naturalization included his birth name (“Joseph Snirpunas”) and his changed name (“Joseph Kean”), and gave his birth date as 19th October 1899. His address was given as 3134 Superior Avenue, Cleveland Ohio. The dates of birth given above for his wife and son are both also confirmed here.
What next for the Snirpunas family?
Just to complete the big fat record dump, William Snirpunas married Johanna A. Feltz, and they had two daughters that I could find:
Antionette Snirpunas (b. 30 Mar 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, d. Jun 1984), SSN 289200917 – “Sep 1942: ANTIONETTE PETERSON SNIRPUNAS; Mar 1947: ANTIONETTE E GIBBY; Jul 1962: ANTOINETTE E HOGAN; 29 Dec 1987: ANTOINETTE HOGAN”
Marion Snirpunas (b. 22 Dec 1927 in Cleveland Cu[yahoga] Ohio, d. 10 Oct 2004), SSN 293263472 – “Mar 1947: MARION PETERSON; Feb 1952: MARION BROWN”.
I couldn’t see what became of Jonas or Antonina Snirpunas.
Was Joseph Kean the Somerton Man?
Joseph Kean fits the bill in so many ways: a miner of the right age, a “Britisher”, an immigrant, and with Baltic DNA.
But the archives haven’t yielded all their secrets yet. Knowing his date and place of birth, we can trace his US WWII draft card, which tells us:
Weight:
155 [lbs]
Complexion:
Ruddy
Eye Colour:
Gray
Hair Colour:
Blonde
Height:
5” 7 1/2″
However, I feel fairly certain that this is also Joseph Kean, SSN 282-05-6088, born 18th October 1899, last residence 44141, Brecksville, Cuyahoga, Ohio, USA, died March 1983 – without much doubt the same Joseph Kean buried in All Saints Cemetery.
So: no, I don’t think that Joseph Kean (né Snirpunas) was the Somerton Man.
Last thoughts, Nick?
For me, the main point of chasing down this rabbit hole was to see if there was any systematic reason why a Lithuanian guy might end up with a name like Joseph Kean – such as the whole supposed “KEANIC” thing (which I never really understood).
In the end, this particular instance seems to have been nothing more complex than an immigrant opportunistically swapping one Catholic immigrant surname for another more pronounceable (and less alien) one to try to blend in in the British Army in WWI. In the big scheme of things, though, I’d be surprised if this was anything more than an outlier.
However, what I did find out was that the US Census records include a lot of detail about parental nationality: and so I wonder if there is a way to search the various US Censuses for all people called Kean or Keane whose mother was Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, or Polish.
When I tried this out, the closest Lithuanian I could find was Maurice Kean (b. ~1906) and Julius Kean (b. ~1910), whose father Samuel Kean was a Jewish tailor from Lithuania. So, no maternal match there.
No hits for Latvia or Estonia: for Poland, I found a Michael and Caroline Kean (both born in Poland) living in Chicago with all their children.
For Russia, however, I found a Jeremy Kean of 79 Garfield Ave, New London CT (b. 1900 to Benjamin and Rosie Kean, both of Russia); a Nathan Kean (b. 1900 to David and Sarah Kean, both of Russia); and so on and so on.
Essentially, it seems that the pattern being followed by a good number of Russian Jewish families was that they Americanised their names to Kean: and I would be unsurprised if this was usually from Cohen / Kohn / etc.
Of course, the Somerton Man was famously uncircumcised, so it would perhaps seem a little unlikely that he was a Cohen-turned-Kean. But… who can tell?
Ever the provocateur, Pete Bowes’ latest challenge concerns the fact that if you look at each of the four short uncrossed-out lines of mysterious text indented on the back of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat, the seventh letter is always A. Well, he says, what are the odds of that, then?
So Let’s Run the Numbers…
For the sake of argument, let’s work with the transcription of the four lines that appears on Wikipedia (simply because it’s somewhere to start):
W R G O A B A B D W T B I M P A N E T P M L I A B O A I A Q C I T T M T S A M S T G A B
OK: it’s dead easy to see the column of four A’s Pete is highlighting, so let’s try to calculate how (un)likely that pattern is.
The four lines contain 2, 1, 3, and 2 As respectively: and no other letter appears on all four lines. So, we might reasonably wonder what the probability of this would be if you randomly anagram each of the four lines. For this to work, all four As would have to fall in the first nine columns.
Line #2: the probability that its single A falls in any of the matchable 9 columns is 9/11. We’ll use whichever column this falls in for the rest of the calculation.
Line #1: two As and 9 columns, probability = 2/9
Line #3: three As and 11 columns, probability = 3/11
Line #4: two As and 13 columns. Probability = 2/13
Multiply these four individual probabilities together (because they all have to be true simultaneously), and you get (9/11)*(2/9)*(3/11)*(2/13) = (12/1573).
So, if you randomly anagrammed each of the four lines, the odds that you would see a column of four As is roughly 1 in 131. Which I think is good to know, because it seems to rule out the possibility that any heavy-duty ciphers (where any such pattern would be destroyed) was employed here.
In short, this is looking even more like an acrostic than it did before.
All ‘Ands On Deck
The suggestion that we are looking at the first letters of four lines of poetry has been floated countless times before. Let’s face it, given that the four lines were written on the back of a book of quatrains (i.e. four-line poems), that hardly requires a huge stretch of the imagination.
But if we centre the same four odd-length lines a bit more, we can see that four As sit extremely close to the centre of each line:
W R G O A B A B D
W T B I M P A N E T P
M L I A B O A I A Q C
I T T M T S A M S T G A B
Looking at this, I’m wondering if this might suggest that two or more of these very central As might be the first letter of the word AND.
Back in 2015, I discussed Barry Traish’s excellent bacronymic poem that he imaginatively reconstructed from the Rubaiyat message’s initials (note that Barry used a slightly different transcription from the one on Wikipedia):
“My road goes on, and by and by divides, Now two branches, into morning, past a new evening that provides, My love is a barren oblivion, and itself alone quite certain, It’s time to move the soul among magic stars, then gently asleep besides.”
You can see that Barry has replaced the As on line #1 and line #3 with AND, so that after a short first idea (“My road goes on”) and following pause (“,”), he uses AND to link the line on to the second idea (“by and by divides”). This is a natural (if somewhat clichéd) way of constructing a simple poem.
Stress Doesn’t Have To Be Stressful
Rearranged yet another way…
W R G O A B A B D
W T B I M P A N E T P
M L I A B O A I A Q C
I T T M T S A M S T G A B
…I’m wondering whether all the central A-words in this third arrangement are unstressed. I’m pretty sold on Barry’s “And By And By” in line #1, and it’s no surprise that the A-words Barry selected are all unstressed:
and and / a / a and alone / among asleep
Moreover: laid out like this, I’m left wondering whether the first half of the first line might have ended up too short: compared to the other three, [W/M] R G O feels like it has a beat missing. Sure, it might conceivably use words with more syllables, but that doesn’t quite feel right to me.
Errm… You Mentioned Tolkien?
Long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers surely know that I occasionally like to drop in fairly tangential references to J. R. R. Tolkien. And why not? Tolkien loved runes and old languages, and he even very probably saw a scratchy rotoscoperotograph copy of the Voynich Manuscript that was floating around Oxford in the 1930s, back when he was an academic there.
Of course, the big thing Tolkien did in the 1930s was write The Hobbit (released in September 1937). The first edition of 1500 copies sold out quickly, and a second edition was printed immediately afterwards: despite paper shortages in WW2, it has never been out of print since.
The book was a huge success in Britain and the US: yet if you look for it in Trove, it only appears in 1937 and 1938, and then you’ll find no mention until Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring was published in the 1950s.
(From “The Art of The Hobbit”)
Why do I mention all this? Simply because I suspect the first line of the poem penned on the back of the Rubaiyat may have been ripped off fromdirectly inspired by the poem that Bilbo recites in the last chapter of The Hobbit, at the end of his long journey back to the Shire:
Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea; Over snow by winter sown, And through the merry flowers of June, Over grass and over stone, And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on Under cloud and under star, Yet feet that wandering have gone Turn at last to home afar. Eyes that fire and sword have seen And horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green And trees and hills they long have known.
To be precise, I suspect it wasn’t Tolkien’s scansion or rhyming or Hobbity doggerel that was the inspiration: but rather the way that the entire first line of the poem presents roads as a straightforward poetic metaphor for life’s journey long spent away but now finally back home.
And so I can’t help but suspect that the first line of the poem (with more than a small nod to Tolkien, & reinstating the Bilboesque ‘ever’ he omitted) was:
My road goes (ever) onwards; and by and by [divides?]
The Missing Child?
If you broadly accept this much (however much of a stretch you find it), then I think you also have to consider the possibility that the Somerton Man bought The Hobbit not for himself (for it was most definitely published as a children’s book), but rather to read to his young child(ren) at bedtime. (And if I had to, I’d guess that this was an eight-year-old boy circa 1938.)
(Yes, for my sins, I indeed read The Hobbit and the complete Lord of the Rings trilogy to my own son when he was young. Please therefore feel free to consider me impossibly old-fashioned, I really don’t mind.)
Putting all this together, I can’t help but feel more than a bit swayed by the (romantic and utterly speculative, but entirely plausible-sounding) notion that we might be able to glimpse the sweep of the Somerton Man’s life embedded in this single (reconstructed) first line: a man born in South Australia, living away in America, having a (Hobbit-loving) ten-year-old son in 1938, and – somewhat like Bilbo Baggins, but let’s not get too carried away, eh? – coming full circle back to the Shire South Australia in 1948.
Where he died, alas. The rest you already know.
Hopefully one day we’ll know if this was indeed how the Somerton Man’s life played out – whether we can see his world in (this) grain of sand. Or if we are – not for the first time – just kidding ourselves like hell. Who can tell?
And finally, the 1930 US Census…
As always, the Somerton Man researchers among us might now be itching to head over to the 1930 US census to look for a J. Kean[e] born around 1900 who had a child born around 1925-1930.
To save you the effort, I dropped by there myself. Here’s who I found:
John Kean, born in Scotland in 1901, immigrated in 1922, machinist, living in Stamford, Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Jessie Kean (28, also from Scotland), daughter Mary Kean (age 1).
John Kean, born 1897, a tile setter living in Queens, New York City with wife Florence Kean (25) and children Daniel (5), Anna (3), and Florence (1).
John Kean, born in Scotland in 1900, immigrated in 1923, carpenter, living in Queens, New York City, with wife Isabel (26, also from Scotland) and son John Kean Jr (2).
Joseph J Kean, born 1898, storeroom clerk in a chemical factory, living in Niagara Falls, with wife Ruth (35) and daughter Virginia (7).
Joseph J Kean, born 1902, digger operator living in Michigan, with wife Mary (23) and children Mary (6), Joseph (5), William (3), Edward (1).
Joseph Kean, born 1900 in England to Lithuanian parents, immigrated 1922, a carter on the elevators, living in Cleveland, Cuyahoga, Ohio with wife Frances (34, also born in England to Lithuanian parents), son John (6).
Joseph Keane, born 1900 in Ireland, immigrated in 1923, plasterer living in New Rochelle, Westchester, New York with wife Helen (28), daughter Ritta (2), and son Joseph (0).
John Keane, born to Irish parents, a salesman living in Yonkers, Westchester with wife Helen (26) and children Nancy (1) and Betty (3).
John Keane, born in 1898, a manager in an asbestos factory, living in Jersey City with wife Anna (25) and daughter Doris (3).
John Keane, born in Missouri in 1897, a confectionery proprietor, living in St. Louis Township MN with wife Edith (25) and son John (2).
John Keane, born in New York in 1896 to Irish parents, a counterman in a restaurant, living in Manhattan with wife Bernice (35) and sons John (2) and James (1).
John Keane, born in Ireland in 1895, immigrated in 1913, a letter carrier living in the Bronx with wife Catherine (26), and children John (1) and Margaret (0).
John Keane, born in Illinois to Irish parents in 1895, an electrical contractor living in Chicago with wife Margret (32), and daughters Mary (7) and Betty (1).
John Keane, born in Ireland in 1895, immigrated in 1916, a labourer living in Jersey City with wife Anna (32, also born in Ireland) and daughter Mary (5).
James Keane, born in Ireland in 1899, immigrated in 1923, a labourer living in Chicago with wife Mary (32) and son James (0).
James Keane, born in 1900 to Irish parents, a sugar truck chauffeur living in Brooklyn with wife Anna (26) and children Donald (6), Leonard (3) and Anna (0).
James Keane, born in Ireland in 1898 to Irish parents, a butcher living in Newark with wife Bertha (26), and children James (3) and Betty (1)
Doubtless there are (many) others in the 1930 census who fit this (extremely speculative) pattern, but that’s the point where my will to go on gave way.
Anyone a-hunting haplogroup H4a1a1a (hi Byron!) will of course be heartened by the presence of British (but Lithuanian-parented) Joseph Kean in Cleveland OH in this list. Make of it all what you will!
