Was the 1947 Roswell Incident a cipher mystery?

by ⋅ 16 Comments

If you’re a little late to the party, a “cipher mystery” is a piece of old writing that we unexpectedly can’t make sense of. But the tricky thing is this: as with many historical objects, an early opinion on a cipher mystery given with sufficient gravitas or authority can hugely skew people’s subsequent perception of not only what it is they’re looking at, but also the entire category of thing it is at all.

Viewed through this kind of lens, I want to discuss the idea that the 1947 Roswell Incident was primarily a cipher mystery.

Influential Opinions on Famous Cipher Mysteries

When you look at long-standing (i.e. still unsolved) cipher mysteries, it’s easy to see how early influential opinions have not only steered subsequent research, but also caused many researchers to only consider certain ways of looking at a puzzling artifact.

For the Voynich Manuscript, the story (reported in a 1665 letter) attributing it to Roger Bacon seems to have completely taken over its eponymous owner Wilfrid Voynich’s mind. The notion that Bacon was its author continued to be argued for throughout the 20th century, with a 2005 book (“The Friar and the Cipher”) by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone being effectively its last hurrah. Yet we have both scientific (radiocarbon dating) and Art History dating evidence (its zodiac roundel illustrations) placing its construction no earlier than 1420, more than a century after Bacon’s death: so whatever ‘the Voynich’ actually is, it’s certainly not Roger Bacon’s baby in any useful sense.

Similarly, the Beale Papers – relating a tangled story about buried treasure – were first brought to public attention via an 1885 pamphlet containing three ciphers (only one of which was solved). Yet it now seems that even though the three Beale Ciphers are likely genuine, the story wrapped around those ciphers was almost entirely spurious. Despite that, it seems that 95% of the Beale research you’ll ever see is to do with the (fake) pamphlet rather than the (probably real) ciphers.

And again, the attribution of a particular pigpen-alphabet cryptogram to the French pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur by the – normally stone cold sober – French maritime historian and archivist Charles de la Ronciere seems to have cemented a perceived link between the two that nobody can split asunder. The key problem is that it requires extraordinary mental gymnastics to construct any kind of mapping between its “two pigeon hearts”-style love-potion recipe plaintext and the Golden Age of Piracy. Yet there seems to be a stream of treasure hunters willing to attempt those contortions, all getting the same inevitably disappointing results.

My point here isn’t so much about cipher theories (please don’t start me on them) but about how early authoritative-sounding opinions on cipher mysteries can sharply narrow the subsequent discourse. I find it hard to see how Wilfrid Voynich’s advocacy of Roger Bacon, the Beale Pamphlet’s made-up frontier history, and de la Ronciere’s footnote-free “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” did anything except get in the way of understanding these three difficult objects.

Of course, in the field of historical research, this is an old story: as a general rule, if you find an area of History dominated by a single framework or founding notion first proposed by a single early voice, it’s often a sign that there’s huge room for modern improvement (if not outright revolution).

But was this also the case for the 1947 Roswell Incident?

Initial Reports: An Alien Alphabet?

Reading through the testimony given (e.g. in Berlitz and Moore’s (1980) “The Roswell Incident”) to do with the initial Roswell incident, there seems little doubt that the “beams” did have some kind of unusual (and unreadable) writing on them. (There’s a big collection of quotations on the subject here.):

  • Maj. Jesse Marcel: “There was all kinds of stuff – small beams about three eighths or a half inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. […] It had little numbers with symbols that we had to call hieroglyphics because I could not understand them. They could not be read, they were just like symbols, something that meant something, and they were not all the same, but the same general pattern, I would say. They were pink and purple. They looked like they were painted on.”
  • Jesse Marcel Jr: “Imprinted along the edge of some of the beam remnants there were hieroglyphic-type characters.”
  • Jesse Marcel Jr: “…there were fragments of what appeared to be I-beams. On the inner surface of the I-beam, there appeared to be a type of writing. This writing was a purple-violet hue, and it had an embossed appearance. The figures were composed of curved geometric shapes. It had no resemblance to Russian, Japanese or any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics, but it had no animal-like characters.”
  • Jesse Marcel Jr: “I do recall one symbol for sure that was on the beam and that was like a truncated pyramid with a ball on top of it. It was the only symbol I can know for sure was on this beam. The rest of it, you know, was just various geometric designs.”
  • Mac Brazel’s son: “But Dad did say one time that there were what he called “figures” on some of the pieces he found. He often referred to the petroglyphs the ancient Indians drew on rocks around here as “figures” too, and I think that’s what he meant to compare them with.”
  • Floyd Proctor: “He said whatever the junk was, it had designs on it that reminded him of Chinese and Japanese designs. […] He said the designs looked like the kind of stuff you would find on firecracker wrappers… some sort of figures all done up in pastels, but not writing like we would do it.”
  • Mac Brazel’s elder sister, Lorraine Ferguson: “Whatever he found it was all in pieces and some of it had some kind of unusual writing on it – Mac said it was like the kind of stuff you find all over Japanese or Chinese firecrackers; not really writing, just wiggles and such. Of course, he couldn’t read it and neither could anybody else as far as I ever heard.”
  • Mac Brazel’s daughter, Bessie Brazel Schreiber: “Some of these pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but there were no words that we were able to make out. […] It looked like numbers mostly, at least I assumed them to be numbers. They were written out like you would write numbers in columns to do an addition problem. But they didn’t look like the numbers we use at all. What gave me the idea they were numbers, I guess, was the way they were all ranged out in columns.”
  • Walt Whitmore, Jr.: “Some of this material had a sort of writing on it which looked like numbers that had been either added or multiplied.”
  • Lt. Jack Trowbridge: “It was aluminum in appearance.  There were fragments of aircraft skin, or whatever the thing was, and also some girders with pictures of hieroglyphic-like things on it.  I took them to be owls (?), but who knows?
  • 1st Lt. Robert Shirkey: “I could see the hieroglyphs clearly, the signs were in relief and stood out.” […] “…sticking up in one corner of the box carried by Major Marcel was a small ‘I-beam’ with hieroglyphic-like markings on the inner flange, in some kind of weird color, not black, not purple, but a close approximation of the two.”

If you put all the above reports together, there seems little doubt that beams with columns of a pastelly-weathered-pink-lavender-purple alien-looking alphabet was one of the key features of the debris found specifically at Roswell.

My point here is that had a load of odd debris without any writing on been found, I don’t think that the whole thing would have been treated as a (capital-I) “Incident“. That is, I think the mysterious ‘alien’ writing was the key feature that turned this from an unknown military-looking device crashing into scrubland outside Roswell into something that was much more intriguing.

And this is why I think the Roswell Incident can sensibly be looked at – when you look at the initial reports – as a cipher mystery.

Note that this isn’t to downplay the (separate) testimony to do with flexible, superstrong metal sheets etc found at the same time. Rather, it’s to point out that from the point of view of what Mac Brazel found at Roswell, what set it apart from other similar events was the mysterious writing on the beam fragments.

Irving Newton on Jesse Marcel

Warrant Officer Irving Newton’s testimony changed over the years in regard to Major Jesse Marcel’s behaviour at the time.

  • 1979: “I was later told that the major from Roswell had identified the stuff as a flying saucer, but that the general [Ramey] had been suspicious of this identification from the beginning…”
  • 1994: “…while I was examining the debris, Major Marcel was picking up pieces of the target sticks and trying to convince me that some notations on the sticks were alien writings. There were figures on the sticks, lavender or pink in color, appeared to be weather faded markings, with no rhyme or reason (sic). He did not convince me that these were alien writings.”
  • 1995: “I remember Marcel chased me all around that room. He kept saying thinks like, ‘Look at how tough the metal is,’ ‘Look at the strange markings on it.’ He wouldn’t have made such a big effort to convince me the thing was extraterrestrial if he thought we were looking at a weather balloon.”
  • 1997: “While we were in the office, he kept following me around with those sticks, those sticks had some hieroglyphic-looking things on there. He said ‘Have you ever see this?’ Well, I had never seen that, I had never seen that on any target that I had seen before; but it was on there. But this strongly indicated to me that he was trying to convince me that he had picked up this flying disc and this was an alien source and that I hadn’t seen that; but all the rest I had seen.”

Regardless, I think it is fairly certain that the first person to consider that the writing found on the beams might be an alien-like alphabet was Major Jesse Marcel (or perhaps his wife Viaud, as per the account in Linda Corley’s book). Though to be fair to Marcel, he seems to have formed his opinion based not only on the strangeness of the writing, but also on the physical strangeness of the materials recovered at the Roswell site.

All the same, it seems that we can trace the idea that Roswell may well have been an alien “Incident” right back to Jesse Marcel’s initial response. Had he not formed that hypothesis and discussed it, would Roswell have been a “thing” at all?

(Again, I’m talking specifically about Roswell here, and not about the claims of a crashed flying saucer at Corona etc.)

Images of the Roswell Writing

Probably the best known image is the one mocked up for the Roswell UFO Museum, based (as I understand it) on a drawing made by Jesse Marcel Jr:

Another one (this time drawn and signed by Major Jesse Marcel) appears on p.42 of Linda Corley’s book “For the Sake of my Country”, where the strokes appear more like this (note that this doesn’t seem to be on the Internet):

/ \ / - ( )

If there are other images of the Roswell Writing out there, I haven’t been able to find them. Please let me know if you stumble upon any others!

Efforts to Decrypt the Roswell Writing

Had this been where the record stopped, we would have very little to go on. The suggestion that the whole Roswell Incident was no more than a downed Project Mogul balloon (designed to listen for Russian atomic bomb tests) that perhaps got hit by lightning in a huge storm is plausible, though still somewhat icky.

If the military knew that what was collected from the debris field was solely fragments from a Project Mogul balloon, this whole line of investigation would surely have stopped dead here. Yet, in Linda Corley’s interview with Jesse Marcel, he said: “They tried to decipher that stuff. But as far as I know, they never did.”

So this is where things start to get murky, because there are other – though admittedly not many – testimonies relating to what the US Military subsequently did to try to decrypt the Roswell writing.

  • Brigadier General Steven Lovekin (talking about a meeting in 1959): “Colonel Hollobard [perhaps Hollogard or Holabird?] brought out a piece of what appeared to be metallic — it was a metallic piece of — it looked like a yardstick. It had deciphering–it had encryption on it. He did describe them as being symbols of instruction. And that’s as far as he would go. But he did infer that the instructions, whatever they might have been, were something that was important enough for the military to keep working on [on] a constant basis.”
  • “It seemed giant-like when I saw it because it was the first time I had ever seen anything like this before. And all eyes were just peeled on that particular thing. And when he told us what it was, it was frightening, it was eery there. You could have heard a pin drop in the room when it was first mentioned.”
  • “He said it had been taken from one of the craft that had crashed in New Mexico. It had been taken from a box of materials that the military was working on. They didn’t use the word reverse engineering at that time, but it was something similar to the reverse engineering they felt like they needed to work on and that it was going to take years to this.”
  • Steve Lytle: “Not all the analysis was done by men assigned to Wright Field. Some of the analysis was made by scientists outside the base.” [Steve Lytle reported that his father, during his long career, had worked with Robert Oppenheimer on a number of occasions and projects. Lytle’s father was a mathematician and, according to Lytle, had been given one of the I-beams recovered at the Roswell site, with an eye to deciphering the symbols.]

But that’s the end of it. As far as I know, what I present here is as much as the (probably) tens of thousands of books on UFOs out there have on decrypting the Roswell Writing. If there’s more… I’m all ears.

What’s Missing From This Picture?

Apart from Jesse Marcel himself (“They tried to decipher that stuff“), we only appear to have two sources that talk about actually trying to decrypt the Roswell Writing, and no report (fleeting or otherwise) whatsoever. (As I understand it, all the copies of the report on 1948 Project Sign were destroyed.)

But if what these two sources say is even partially true, the Roswell Writing must have had some kind of military designation attached to it. So what was its codeword? And in which ‘Indiana Jones warehouse’ are all the collected beams stored?

All the same, what is so scary about the evidence that not one photographic image of this writing has seen the light of day in more than seventy years?

Personally, I have no interest in stories about crashed flying saucers and X-Files-style “grays”, etc – basically, there’s no shortage of people out there who “want to believe”, and I have no desire to be added to that list.

But as for a 1947 cipher mystery that seems in some way to have spawned the whole modern UFO era, count me in on that, 100%. I want to see the primary evidence, and I want to see it now!

“Roswell: First Witness” and ciphers…

by ⋅ 9 Comments

Though not remotely a Ufologist myself, I’ve just watched “Roswell: First Witness” on the Blaze Freeview channel (top tip: record these and 32x fast forward through the loooong ad breaks and the almost-as-long recaps, otherwise it’ll take you all day), which threw up a couple of interesting cipher-related tidbits I thought I’d share with you.

1. Jesse A. Marcel’s Alien Alphabet

Though Jesse Marcel was neither the first to reach the Roswell debris site in July 1947 (that was actually W.W. “Mac” Brazel) nor the second (that was probably Timothy D. Proctor), he was certainly one of the first five witnesses. But I can quite see how “Roswell: Fourth Witness” probably didn’t have the required punch.

In the programme, one woman (Linda Corley) brought out a piece of paper apparently signed by Marcel, which she said Marcel had drawn to depict the alien lettering he had seen on a piece of wood-like (but not actually wood) beam-like debris. The signs reportedly resembled a series of simple curves and strokes:

( ) – / \

She then went away and looked these up, finding as a match our old friends Tironian notes. (Romans in Space! Am I the only person who remembers “The Tomorrow People: A Rift In Time” (1974) episode? Probably.) At which point Marcel allegedly span round 180 degrees and strongly asked her never to mention the lettering again etc.

To be fair, I’d say these simple curves and slashes resemble a minimalist tachygraphic alphabet, i.e. an alphabet pared down for speed and clarity rather than for expressiveness. Which is quite interesting in itself, though without necessarily being Tironian.

My question here is this: are there any UFO books out there that claim to give more examples of writing or markings in this same alphabet? I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere else, but given that my personal library contains not even a single book on UFOs, that’s perhaps not hugely surprising.

2. Jesse A. Marcel’s Journal / Diary / Memorandum Book

Arguably the central focus of the TV programme is a notebook owned by Marcel’s descendants. Though this is mostly full of normal cursive writing, at one point in mid-1947 this halts and gets replaced by lots of curious mixed-case block-letter quotations (many now dated and sexist, *sigh*). Here are a couple screen-grabbed from the programme:

The question then arose as to whether these might have been using some kind of Baconian biliteral cipher. To try to answer this, the film-makers gave scans of the diary to Professor Craig Bauer, a mathematician who Cipher Mysteries readers will hopefully remember for his “Unsolved” (a chunky recent book on unsolved historical ciphers, with a particular authorial focus on Americana) rather than for the somewhat lame (and now totally disproven) speculations he contributed to a high(ish)-profile TV documentary series on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers.

Bauer (and presumably grad student Jack Anderson) then went away and wrote biliteral cipher decryption code to try to work out what was going on. The kinds of Baconian letter-form pairs they found looked like this:

Unfortunately their decryption attempts didn’t come up with anything worthwhile, i.e. their results were inconclusive.

However, from my own unsolved historical cipher perspective, it seems to me that Bauer et al. properly failed to test the statistical validity of their hypothesis before launching into writing code to exhaustively search the biliteral space. In other words, they didn’t look before they leaped. For example, if the ratio of each biliteral A:B letter-pair is 4:1 or worse, and moreover many of the capital forms appear word-initial (as you’d expect), something has probably already gone badly wrong with your assumptions before you even started.

In my experience, hand ciphers are primarily not about mathematics but about steganography – distracting the eye so the core of the actual cipher trundles past unnoticed. Hence you need to be sure you have cracked a cipher’s steganographic wrapper properly before you start writing any code, and I’m not sure that this preliminary sanity-checking stage happened here to the degree it should have.

Even so, though I’d be extraordinarily surprised if these quotations were concealing a message written in biliteral cipher, that’s not at all to say that they might not be concealing a message in a quite different way.

Has anyone got scans of the “Memorandum” book? I wouldn’t mind casting an independent eye on this section, see if there’s anything there to be found.

Timeline of the “Tamam Shud” slip…

by ⋅ 98 Comments

I thought it would be good to collect my notes on the Tamam Shud slip together in a single post, hopefully this will give a little clarity.

1st December 1948, 6am

Man found dead on Somerton Beach. Unsurprisingly, nobody thinks to stick an inquisitive finger into the dead man’s trouser fob pocket, so the tiny rolled-up slip of paper hiding in there evades everyone’s attention.

1st December 1948, 6:01am

Rodger Todd’s terrier Dandy (allegedly) pees on the Somerton Man, anticipating 75% of SM-related blog posts by several decades.

1st December 1948, 6:02am

The first of many Somerton Man conspiracy theories gets launched. (Lord spare us from any more.)

19th April 1949

Feltus, “The Unknown Man”, p.79:

“On the 19th. April, 1949 Professor Cleland informed me [Detective Sergeant Leane] that he had found a small piece of paper in the Fob Pocket of the deceased’s trousers produced, bearing the words Tamam Shud”

29th April 1949

In a letter Leane wrote to Adelaide Police Superintendent W. O. Sheridan, he mentions having shown the tie (with “KEANE” on the back) to an Egyptian called Moss Keipitz who worked in a butcher’s shop in Hindley Street, Adelaide. The seven-language-speaking Keipitz didn’t offer an opinion on the “Tamam Shud” slip, but opined on everything else:

Mr Keipitz is of the opinion that the name on the neck tie is ‘KEANIC’ pronounced ‘QUANIC’ and that the name of European origin, either a Chechsolvakian, Yugoslavian or from a Baltic country. He viewed the body, which helped him to form his opinion. He further [states] that the initial, which was thought to be a ‘T’ is a ‘J’ written in Arabic.

Who was “Moss Keipitz”? Moss is almost certainly Moshe, short for Moses: while my current best guess is that Keipitz is a slightly mangled version of Heifitz. (My guess is that the name was written down but then miscopied.)

If you look on Australia’s NAA site, you’ll find an Egyptian called Salomon Samuel Heifetz (born 5th May 1888 in Istanbul) arriving from Napoli to Melbourne on the 15th May 1949, along with a Sabina Heifetz who then “left the Commonwealth” on 1st March 1952. (There’s a Victorian genealogical record of a Sabina Heifetz 1887-1952, who died in Mbeena, Australia, which I’m guessing was her.) So I’m guessing that they were man and wife.

Similarly, the NAA has a Samuel Heifetz (born 3rd May 1918 in Alexandria) arriving by air in Sydney 1st October 1948, and his wife Farida (Frida) Eskenaze Heifetz (born 4th May 1923 in Cairo) and their daughter Sonia (born 8th October 1946 in Cairo) arriving by air 8th February 1949.

Here are Frida and Sonia in 1949: note that the permanent address Frida gave on her 1949 air passenger card was “52 Tunis St, N. Adelaide”, the address where her husband was living at the time.

And here is Frida Heifetz in 1952:

Samuel Heifetz was Manager of World Travel Service Pty: and it seems that his father (who had applied for naturalisation in 1954) died in October 1956, as per this notice of condolence:

My best current guess is therefore that Moss Keipitz / Moshe Heifetz was Samuel Heifetz’s brother, and that Salomon Samuel Heifetz and Sabina Heifetz were their parents. (Note that Moshe Heifetz could not have been Samuel Heifetz, because the conversation with Leane happened while Samuel Heifetz was in transit from Europe. But note that “Moss” could possibly have been Salomon Samuel Heifetz, who would have been 61 at the time.)

Can other researchers please test this (pretty specific) guess? Thanks!

3rd May 1949

Even after talking with Moss Keipitz, SAPOL still believed that “Tamam Shud” was in Turkish.

Adelaide Advertiser, p.1

A small piece of paper printed in Turkish which was found in the dead man’s pocket has led police to assume that he was able to speak that language.

Note that it was (according to Feltus p.79) “Frank Kennedy, the Police Roundsman for the Advertiser”, who told Detective Brown: “If you are looking from where the words ‘Tamam Shud’ come from, find a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Some copies end in Tamam and some in Tamam Shud.” So it seems fairly safe to conclude that Kennedy suggested this after 3rd May 1949.

8th June 1949

Feltus p.79:

At one time Detective Brown stated:
“On Wednesday 8th. June, 1949 I went to Beck’s bookshop in Pulteney St., Adelaide and made a search of a number of copies of a poem named RUBAIYAT and written by Omar Khayyam. […]”

10th June 1949

On 10th June 1949, Detective Brown circulated a lengthy report (each including a photographic copy of the Tamam Shud slip) to the police in all states.

The following two newspaper reports from the time (quoted in Feltus, p.81) describe the slip in a little more detail:

Because the top of the scrap of paper had been cut clean, it did not fit into the torn part of the page. But the bottom of it corresponded with the printer’s trimming at the foot of the page, and police are satisfied that the piece was torn from the book.

As the scrap of paper found on the dead man had been trimmed, police were unable to identify the book merely by fitting it into the torn page. Proof will now rest with tests on the paper and the print.

Week Commencing 25th July 1949

Tests comparing the paper of the slip to the paper of the book found in the car of an “Adelaide businessman” “in November 1948” were to be carried out during the week commencing 25th July 1949, according to this newspaper article. The rest is, as you already know, mystery. 🙂

Charles Gazzam Hurd and the Somerton Man…?

by ⋅ 11 Comments

A month ago, I exchanged a series of emails with a nice – though somewhat retiring – correspondent, who suggested that I might consider whether the Somerton Man was in fact Charles Gazzam Hurd. Here’s Hurd and his son (Charles Gazzam Hurd Jr):

The Disappeared

The last we know of Hurd’s life (from The Doe Network) is as follows:

  • On 18th Feb 1937, Hurd left his workplace at 15 William Street, Manhattan (he was a manager of a real estate and mortgage department) at a normal time
  • He had dinner at a restaurant / night club on East 54th Street
  • He cashed a small cheque and left
  • He crashed his Ford convertible coupe “into a pillar of an elevated railway structure at 3rd Avenue and 37th Street”
  • He (apparently) suffered only minor injuries, drove off but then disappeared forever

At the time this happened, he was separated from his (wealthy) wife Marie Louise Schrieber, and was living at the Kenmore Hall Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. She remarried within a year of Hurd’s death.

His son Charles Gazzam Hurd Jr (born 1930, died 2015) seems to have been a thoroughly lovely bloke: “one time he orchestrated an epic Halloween prank involving a séance, the ghost of Benedict Arnold, and a couple of hydrocarbon fireballs that sent several 11-year-old girls into hysterics; an event that surely would have sparked an outcry on social media today.” Rock’n’roll!

Also: Hurd’s granddaughter Amy Hurd Fetchko has been doing a lot of her own digging, and there’s a nice podcast interview with her that covers much of what she has found, triggered by her father writing his memoirs. Did CGH Jr – as he believed he remembered – watch Tarzan with his father four months after his father’s death? Or had his father committed suicide in despair (as part of her family believes)? All very mysterious.

The Theories

It’s not widely known that there’s an (actually fairly sizeable) Internet community of people who try to identify John & Jane Does, often by connecting the few facts associated with a given person (height, build, hair colour, clothing, age) with those of other individuals who have disappeared. Indeed, a few of the more successful instances have ‘broken out’ into mass media (articles, books, TV, and probably even films).

On Reddit’s r/UnresolvedMysteries, plenty of people weigh in (a) that Hurd was probably a drunk driver, and (b) given that the East River was a mere three blocks away from where he was last, therefore (c) the most likely place you’ll find both him and his car (which disappeared at the same time) is the bottom of the river. Drunk driving, depression, head injury, concussion, impulsive suicide… all these are possible and in play (not at all unreasonably, it has to be said). (Websleuths don’t hugely disagree with this.)

Amy Hurd Fetchko also suggests that her grandfather – who she says was definitely a gambler – might possibly have got into money trouble with the Mob, and as a result either got killed or just changed his name and started afresh somewhere else. (She wonders whether the restaurant / night club where he had eaten might have been a Mob joint, etc.)

Alternatively, you won’t have far to look in the broader group of (what one might call) ‘The Disappeared‘ to find middle-aged men who dropped out of their life to start a new life with a second (often bigamous) wife. So it’s not entirely surprising to find that a number of amateur investigators have proposed that Hurd might have – by some random path – have ended up dead on Somerton Beach on 1948, i.e. that he might have started afresh in Australia but ended up as the Somerton Man.

A good source on this theory is a set of (nine) pages on Unexplained Mysteries. As you’d expect, it all pivots on ear shapes and so on. But… all the same, it just feels wrong to me. Dredge the East River, save us all the hassle, OK?

(Now The Real Post Begins)

OK, even though I’ve assembled all the information on Charles Gazzam Hurd in one place above, the stuff that actually interests me here isn’t Hurd himself, but rather the swirl of stuff around ‘The Disappeared’. For me, a much better question would be about why so many people are interested in identifying John / Jane Does.

Is this about closure, doing good, being helpful, connecting to (often long dead) people in a disconnected modern world? Is it about becoming interested in something, and then repeatedly scratching some kind of previously-unnoticed research itch that never quite scabs over? Is it about just finding an online community that you can settle into, safe in the knowledge that there really aren’t any terribly bad theories? Or is it about being nosy, opinionated, mouthing off, bickering, forum fighting, disagreeing, and occasionally trolling relatives and descendants?

Or some wobbly mix of all four?

Regardless, one thing that unites almost all of these cold cases is that there is very rarely any money to be made. Unlike the Zodiac Killer (where just about everybody involved seems to have written one or more awful books, along with a fair few of the fake letters trolling the police in the 1970s), there’s no huge glory to be had in identifying nameless victims. So in many ways, ‘Doe-hunting’ is – on the face of it – a fairly harmless pursuit.

For those who try to do this in a sensible way – i.e. by going to archives and primary sources where possible, and taking a resolutely evidence-centred approach – there’s nothing much you could say is wrong with what they’re doing. What happened happened, and nothing you can do now can unhappen it, right? It’s just trying to help, right?

Sort of, yes: but also sort of no. While it’s certainly nice to help identify people who have died mysteriously without a trace, people have no alienable Human Right to be Identified in the Unlikely Event of Their Mysterious Death. And given that these searches tend to be very long-term, they consume a lot of the searcher’s life, often yielding little or nothing of significant value in return. So, putting all the “The Journey is the Destination” blather to one side, there is a personal cost to the living to be considered here: the John / Jane Doe themselves have nothing much to benefit either – after all, it’s a bit late for closure for them.

And before you channel your inner Moe and say “Think of the family! Think of the family!“: in many, many cases the family simply have no idea at all. Someone just lost touch, and for countless years they stayed lost… until the Online Cold Case Enthusiasts gleefully poked their Internet noses in, typically offering a decades-later hallucinogenic mix of sort-of-hope and victim details gleaned from scratchy old police reports.

In my opinion, the real reason people get involved tends to be something quite different: typically (I suspect) more to do with finding kinship in an online community than with an overdeveloped sense of morality or desire for natural justice. Finding Charles Gazzam Hurd’s family tree more interesting than your own family tree is all very well, but a dispassionate observer probably couldn’t help but wonder whether this does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?

Blame Davina & Co? Why not!

This is also a pastime that familial DNA is rapidly transforming, making it just about as redundant as redundant can be. Why trawl through thousands of pages of scrawly old archives for years (or even decades) for a half-glimpse at something that may or may not be connected, when GEDmatch can move you closer to a rock solid answer inside a day?

Maybe it’s wrong to blame Davina and her TV buddies for making this so gosh-darn visible. All the same, it’s hard not to look at both the serried ranks of DNA-themed documentaries – national treasures (Piss-)Ant & Dec, dahlin’ Stacey Dooley, Bloodline Detectives, etc etc – and the rise in interest in DNA police cold-casery and see some kind of correlation there, right?

And as more and more people upload their DNA to databases, there seems little doubt in my mind not only that database results will become more and supportive, but also that the ever-improving familial-searching tools wrapped around them will automate more and more of the research processes involved.

At the same time, my understanding is that we’re simultaneously about to be hit by a rapid influx of AI-powered tools able to read old handwritten documents. Hence it seems highly likely to me that it won’t be too long before we see companies making this accessible at scale, where their “Google for genealogy”-style offerings pull together and automate a lot of the genealogical grunt work. (And let’s face it, most online family trees you’re likely to see are full of over-optimistic junk unsupported by any genuine evidence. So there’s a great deal to improve on here.)

So, even though we’re just about at the point where a load of researchers are getting actually quite good at genealogy and cold case research, we might also be at the start of a period where all that stuff becomes heavily automated and commoditised. And what then of online cold case forums? Computer says yes, computer says no: but either way, the computer says it.

Looking ahead, then, I expect DNA tools will obliterate not just individual cold cases but in time also the whole idea of cold cases. Similarly, I expect AI will obliterate genealogy (and why on earth haven’t LDS tried this, you’d have thought they’d be at the front of the queue?). I give it 10-15 years before they’re both as passé as wax cylinder recordings.

What Then of Cipher Mysteries?

So what then about the Somerton Man, and the Adirondack Enigma, and so forth? Yes, where cipher mysteries form just one strand of any cold case that is more of a WhoWasIt than a WhoDunnIt, I indeed think it’s a pretty safe bet that the plucky DNA genealogists will (eventually) get on board and figure out the person’s real identity.

In the case of the Zodiac Killer, police cold case teams (and the swarm of TV documentary teams kissing their poh-lice butts) must now surely be slowly grinding their way through the mass of Zodiac envelopes, stamps and other evidential gubbins looking for DNA hits. At the very least, you’d have thought – as I’m told happened not so long ago with the Cheri Jo Bates cold case – they’d have figured out which nutters sent taunting letters to the LAPD (hint: most of these probably weren’t sent by Zodiac). To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if 75% of those were actually sent by idiot Zodiacologists, but that’s perhaps going to be an unpopular opinion for a while yet.

However, the one thing that we’re still a loooong way from is using technology to crack top-end cipher mysteries. For example, while Hauer and Kondrak’s 2021 paper (on the Dorabella Cipher) accepted that Keith Massey’s observations were extremely strong, the authors still just waltzed past them regardless, despite their obvious inconsistency with, say, everything that they had hypothesized, written, and concluded. All of which made what would have otherwise been a basically good paper end up a bit too ‘baity’ for my taste.

So there you have the actual start of the art: known-system ciphers we can now crack in no time, but cipher mysteries? There’s no sea turtle that can hold its breath long enough for cipher mysteries to reveal their secrets. But in the end, perhaps that’s a good thing, right? 😉

At last, a Voynich testicle theory!

by ⋅ 32 Comments

And yes, you have me to blame for it.

So here goes…

It all starts in Frascati…

Today’s story begins in the Voynich Centenary Conference back in 2012, with – as I recall – a bunch of Voynicheros crowding around my Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Voynich Manuscript photo-facsimile. With the pages turned to some of the Q13A (medical) pages, Rene Zandbergen remarked that some of the pictures there looked eerily like slightly-disguised medical drawings.

The two diagrams I specifically remember Rene mentioning that day were (a) the “intestines” one:

Voynich Manuscript f77v (right)

And… (b) well, this piece of the male anatomy (which nobody can deny has a tube running through it):

Voynich Manuscript f77v (left)

Rene himself didn’t claim to have been the first to point out these similarities, but rather said that he had heard them mentioned many years before. As normal, a diligent trawl of the old Voynich mailing list archives would probably reveal more lineage (but it’s not hugely important for the purposes of this post).

Also, as I’m sure many (if not most) Cipher Mysteries readers know, countless Voynich theories have been constructed around the notion that Q13 (Quire 13) has some kind of connection with the female reproductive system, in particular this gloriously mad drawing, with all its oddly misplaced frilly wolkenbanden:

Voynich Manuscript f77v (top)

A few pages further on, there’s also a curious pulsating blue brain thing (I have no idea what this means, and I don’t know if anyone has yet looked for visual parallels for it in 15th century manuscripts, perhaps it’s the kind of thing Koen Gheuens would like to take a stab at?):

Voynich Manuscript f83r

But you mentioned “testicles”, right?

I did. And so (at last) here’s the specific Voynich image from Q13 that I’m wondering about.

Voynich Manuscript f83v

Putting aside the whole ‘nymph’ issue to one side, what – you might reasonably ask – has got into me to wonder if this specific veiled drawing somehow represents a gigantic pair of testicles?

Benedetto Reguardati

A few posts back, I gave a list of authors who wrote small works on thermal baths in the first half (or so) of the fifteenth century. One of those authors was Benedetto Reguardati, a doctor who spent many years attending to the newly-installed Sforza Duke’s family in Milan (and environs).

He wrote a number of small treatises, including a pharmacopoeia that can be found in Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS Ricc. 818. This commences (on fol. 2r) with:

Emplastrum optimum ad inflationem testiculorum…

i.e. “the best plaster [normally a paste or salve applied to the skin on a piece of linen or leather] for swollen testicles…“

Sadly, I don’t have access to a transcript of Reguardati’s pharmacopeia (merely its incipit), so don’t know how this continues. Obviously this would be a prime research target for anyone who wants to chase after 15th century recipes for enlarged testicles.

Medieval Writings on Testicles

(By which I don’t actually mean tattoos.)

Though I haven’t yet stumbled upon a literature specifically covering medieval recipes for testicular complaints, it would perhaps be unwise to assume such a niche thing doesn’t exist. Even a fairly cursory search revealed that most testicle-related medical mishaps and scenarios were written about in the Middle Ages.

For example, Arnald of Villanova wrote about testicular hernias; Thorndike (1936) mentions a medical “Experimenta” found in “fols. gr, col. i-gv, col. 2 (older numbering, 1-7) of Vatic. Palat. lat. 1174, a vellum ms of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century with alternating red and blue initials“, that has a section name “Ad tumorem testiculorum”. Similarly, Simon of Genoa discussed testicular abscesses in his medical dictionary.

John Bradmore also included several brief sections on testicular complaints in his “Philomena” (see Lang 1998):

  • 70v 40 de Apostematibus Testiculorum
  • 71r 41 de Apostemate hernia Aquosa testiculorum
  • 72r 42 de Apostemate hernia ventosa testiculorum
  • 73r 43 de (Apostemate) hernia Carnosa et varicosa testiculorum
  • 73r 44 De Apostemate hernia humorali testiculorum

Also: p.196 of this book mentions Bodleian MS Selden B35 (circa 1465) as listing “Ydicelidos” = “i. habens testiculos inflatos”, with a footnote mentioning Simon of Genoa’s “Clavis Sanationis”: “Hydrocelici vel ut grecus ydrokilis, dicuntur qui aquam habent circa testiculos in oscum”.

So I think it should hardly be a surprise to find Reguardati writing about salves for swollen testicles. But it turns out that he was far from the only one.

Medieval Swollen Testicles

However, what did surprise me was that I was able to find a good number of different medieval recipes for swollen testicles.

Egritudines Tocius Corporis, written by a physician names Copho in the second half of the 11th century, includes the following section:

De inflatione testiculorum — Ad inflationem testiculorum sine materia, interiora labarum trita optime coquas, et ut comeduntur calida superponus; vel, quod melius est, galbanum in vino coque et cola et in colatura spongiam marinam diu bullias et superponas; vel ebuli seu sambuci summitates diu in vino bullias, et postea cum axungia teras, et hoc totum super testiculos ponas. Si autem maxima duricia sit in testiculis duas pelliculas incide et in tercia stamina pone, et tam diu teneat durice materia que duriciem operatur recedut.

According to Monica H. Green, four versions of the Trotula include an extra section “Ad inflatione testiculorum”:

  • 34: Harley 3407
  • 70: Digby 29
  • 74: Wood empt. 15 (SC 8603)
  • 80: New College, 171

I don’t have access to the full text of this section, but it begins:

Ad testiculos inflatos fomentum, accipe maluam, absinthium, uerbenam, bismaluam, cassillaginem, arthimesiam, caules.

13th century Portuguese physician Pedro Hispano’s (Petrus Hispanus) Liber de conservanda sanitate (book by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (1973), p.233) has a Chapter XXXV, “De inflatione testium”:

  1. Si testes inflentur, farina fabarum distemperata cum suco ebuli et oleo communi statim inflationem soluit. Dyascorides.
  2. Item idem faciunt folia ebuli uel parietarie torrefacta.
  3. Item idem faciunt folia ebuli et sambuci. Hoc ego.
  4. Item fimus caprinus cum uino solutus omnem tumerm soluit, Kyrannus.
  5. Item folia et semen iusquiama trita cum uino et emplastrata omnem tumorem soluit. Macer.
  6. Item betonica trita et cocta in uino et apposita dolorem et tumorem aufert testiculorum. Dyascorides.

(Note that da Rocha Pereira also includes a quite different version of that same basic chapter in a footnote.)

From Guillem de Béziers (fl. ~1300), we have another recipe “Contra inflationem testiculorum” (on. p.27):

Item. Contra inflationem testiculorum. Fiat primo subfumigium de aqua calida ad apertionem pororum et postea immittatur agrippa, deinde fiat emplastrum de fimo caprino et sepo arietino et thure, et ad ulti[mu]m minutionem vene sophene fac aperire interiori et sic multi curati sunt.

“Three Receptaria from Medieval England” (Hunt & Benskin) includes a couple of items:

  • p.26: [207]: Uncore ad inflacionem testiculorum: Recipe malvam, artemisiam, jusquiamum, et caules veteres. Et si non potes habere hec omnia, accipoantur absinthium et malve tantum, et decoquantur et in illa decoctione epithimentur testiculi.
  • p.27: [210]: Item paritoria frixa in patella et testiculis superposita removet inflationem testiculorum.

Thoughts, Nick?

Books on baths and medicine were often bound together, so suggesting that the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 might well contain both balneological and medical bifolios should cause no great tremors. And indeed the bifolios do – as Glen Claston pointed out many years ago – seem to be thematically divided between balneo and medical (in some way).

If you accept this is right, then the idea that a late medieval medical book like this might contain a short section on swollen testicles is surely not a huge stretch, given the number of different sources listed above that contain recipes or treatments for the same.

Might one of these recipes – or something very much like them – be the plaintext for some of the text on f83v? It’s a pretty good challenge, and definitely not a load of balls. 😉

“The pompous loop”…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

I’ve just found a very intriguing reference to Anthony Petti’s (1977) book “English literary hands from Chaucer to Dryden” (a copy of which which I have of course ordered, and which I hope will arrive within the next month).

It was mentioned by Isabel De la Cruz-Cabanillas and Irene Diego-Rodríguez of the University of Alcalá in their (2018) “Abbreviations in Medieval Medical Manuscripts”, downloadable via Researchgate. They rely mainly on Petti (1977) pp. 22-25 for their functional description of how abbreviation works in manuscripts: so yes, it is indeed true that I have once again blown £40+ of my book budget on four measly pages. (Possibly even just one.)

Note that they also cite:

  • Hector (1958) “The Handwriting of English Documents“, pp. 28–38
  • Denholm-Young (1964) “Handwriting in England and Wales” pp. 64–70
  • Brown (1993) “A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600“, p. 5
  • Preston & Yeandle (1999) “English Handwriting 1400–1650. An Introductory Manual“, pp. ix–x
  • Clemens & Graham (2007) “Introduction to Manuscript Studies“, pp. 89–93

Michelle Brown’s book I already have here (somewhere, *sigh*), so I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen her page 5. But the obvious reason I haven’t looked at the rest (bar Ray Clemens’ book) is that they talk specifically about English manuscripts, which is something that I’ve never particularly considered in the context of the Voynich Manuscript.

So: why might a Voynich researcher suddenly be so interested in English manuscripts?

“How to deal with this pompous loop?”

Basically, what Cruz-Cabanillas & Diego-Rodríguez are talking about is 15th century English scribal abbreviation mechanisms: but in terms of those mechanisms’ “Marvel origin stories”, these were – for the most part – Latin scribal mechanisms which English scribes had appropriated for abbreviating English.

In C-C & D-R’s section on contractions (p.170), they mention the macron-like suspension mark used (very widely) to indicate that letters have been removed (usually a nasal ‘m’ or ‘n’). However, they also describe a very specific stroke I hadn’t heard specifically mentioned before:

The usual form to mark the omission is a bar, but Petti (1977: 22) mentions an older variant, “though still in use in the late 15th century, was a crescent-shape, often with a dot below”.

That’s interesting in itself: but it’s immediately followed by something even more interesting:

When the abbreviation takes place at the end of a word, “in cursive hands there was a practice of making either the bar or the apostrophe part of the upward curve on the final stroke of a letter” (Petti 1977: 22) When the word ends in <n> this poses the problem whether the mark above the final letter is to be extended or it is just an otiose stroke. This happens very often with words containing the suffix in <-ion>, such as decoccion in Hunter 328. Here the editor must decide whether the stroke going up and backwards is a decorative flourish or should be expanded.

They continue their high-speed summary of Petti’s discussion in their section on “Curtailments and suspensions” that appears next (p.171):

Often final <n>, as it happened in the case of suffix <-ion> above, may show a bar on top of it or a kind of pompous stroke going up and backwards. It is always troublesome how to deal with this pompous loop. Alonso-Almeida (2014: 98), in the case of Present-day English gallon in Hunter 185 f. 51r, interpreted it as galoun. Nevertheless, some other editors, when the final stroke parts from the line level of letter may consider it an otiose stroke and the word would be rendered as galon instead.

Other examples of this “pompous stroke” noted by Cruz-Cabanillas & Diego-Rodríguez are:

  • Harley 2378, f7r, “Saturn[e]” – see Means (1993: 246)
  • Additional 12195, f187v, “mon[e]” – see Taavistainen et al (2005)

What are you thinking about here, Nick?

Plainly, the reason I’m so interested here is that Petti (via C-C & D-R) seems to be flagging exactly the kind of 15th century scribal abbreviation mechanism I’ve been searching for over the last 15 years or so, that other sources had talked about (but just not in a specific enough way to be helpful).

If you look at the glyphs that appear in the Voynich Manuscript, I’d argue that there’s something of the opportunistic jackdaw about their choice. For instance, EVA’s choice of letter-shapes notwithstanding, the EVA n on the end of the “aiin” group looks more like the v in “aiiv”: which I think matches up with the (fairly common) “aiir” group we also see to provide a visually striking “a ii r[ecto]” and “a ii v[erso]” pair.

Similarly, I’ve long believed that the “4o” pair (EVA qo) was almost certainly a pre-existing (late 14th century) letter pair appropriated by the Voynichese alphabet designer in order to solve some kind of writing/ciphering problem (because we see exactly the same 4o pair appearing in multiple cipher keys from around Northern Italy from this period.)

So: what I’m now wondering is whether the scribal loop we see at the end of “aiiv” group going upwards and backwards may well be a Voynichese appropriation of the same abbreviating pompous loop that Petti is describing.

Incidentally, the earliest examples of similar scribal ‘tics’ that I’ve seen are in some documents from Rome dating to the early 1450s that I found in a palaeographic source book at the BL. But even there I’m 90% sure that those would be characterised as “otiose loops” rather than “pompous loops”.

Where next from here?

The list of manuscripts that Cruz-Cabanillas & Diego-Rodríguez specifically mention as having pompous loops are:

  • Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 185 – early 15th century (book of recipes etc)
  • Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 328 – late 15th century
  • British Library, Harley MS 2378 – mid 15th century
  • British Library, Additional MS 12195 – around 1477 (“A great part of this volume would appear to have been written by John Leke, of Northcreyke, in Norfolk, in the reign of Edward the Fourth”, saith the BL)

Unsurprisingly, the kind of things I now want to know are:

  • What exactly did Petti say about this pompous loop?
  • Where can I see examples of this pompous loop?
  • Are there pompous loops in other languages / countries?
  • Do palaeographers writing in other languages have their own names for this pompous loop?
  • etc

But rather than overload this post yet further, I’ll continue this discussion in a follow-on post…

The Keff family that disappeared…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

I recently posted about my search for Edouard Keff, and noted that it was possible that he might have been born in Chateaurouge as a brother of Jean Keff and Pierre Keff whose troubled (bagnard) histories I had previously found.

As part of all this, I ended up doing my best to reconstruct the Keff family tree, something which no genealogist on filae.com or on Geneanet.org seems to have managed particularly well. However, I should point out that a good part of this was probably because they often rely on specialised town / area genealogical studies, where groups of volunteers comb through a locality’s birth / baptism / marriage (and sometimes divorce) / death registers, and then use that to try to assemble local family trees.

Because geographical mobility was (for the most part) traditionally low, this – as a genealogical rule of thumb – makes plenty of practical sense. But for more mobile families (like the one that Jean & Pierre Keff were born in), you end up with different localised fragments of genealogy in different places that don’t quite connect up with each other. As you’ll see, the Keff famille moved from Hombourg-Haut, Moselle to Chateaurouge, Moselle, to Bouzonville, Moselle, to Paris.

The parents of the Keff family

  • Pierre Marie Keff: b. 21 Aug 1801, Hombourg, Moselle, to Jean Keff & Eve Weiss; d. 29 Aug 1848, Paris 5e Arrondissement
  • Catherine Andre: b. 10 Oct 1805 to Pierre Andre and Anne Marie Hamann, died 1894, Paris 15e Arrondissement.
  • Married: 20 Oct 1830, Hombourg-Haut, Moselle.

Their children

  • Jean Keff: b. 1830 Hombourg Haut, d. 1830
  • Jean Michel Keff: b. 23 Sep 1831, Hombourg Haut; d. 05 July 1853, Terre-de-Haut, Guadeloupe
  • Pierre Keff: b. 13 May 1833, Chateaurouge; d. 15 Jun 1911, Paris
  • Catherine Keff: b. 03 Apr 1835, Chateaurouge; [death unknown]
  • Marguerite Keff: b. 15 May 1837, Bouzonville; d. 13 Jan 1843, Bouzonville
  • Therese Keff: b. 02 Apr 1839, Bouzonville; d. 1894, Paris
  • Jean Keff: b. 25 July 1841, Bouzonville; d. 10 Feb 1894, Ile Nou, Nouvelle Caledonie
  • Elisabeth Keff: b. 11 Apr 1843, Bouzonville; d. [“Elise Keff”] 27th April 1849, Paris, 5e Arrondissement
  • Madelaine Keff: b. Jan 1844, Bouzonville; d. 13 January 1844
  • Joseph Keff: b. 30 Apr 1845, Bouzonville; d. 19 Jan 1846
  • Nicolas Keff: b. 12 Feb 1848; d. 28 Apr 1849 Paris, 5e Arrondissement

Their grandchildren

Therese Keff married Joseph Claude Branciard (theatre director) [b. ~1836].

  • No children (as far as I can see)

Pierre Keff married Catherine Birschens. They had two children:

  • Victorine Josephine Keff: b. 27 Nov 1864; d. 03 May 1865
  • Josephine Catherine Keff: b. 21 Jun 1863, Paris; d. 14 Mar 1944, Paris

Jean Keff married Reine Lichtenberger. They had four children:

  • Leon Pierre Jean Keff: b. 20 Feb 1865, Paris; d. 27 Feb 1900, Paris (as “Pierre Jean Leon Keff”)
  • Pierre Jean Baptiste Keff: b. 20 Jun 1866, Paris; [but then disappears]
  • Jules Joseph Keff: b. Jun 1866 (?); d. 9th Mar 1869 [aged 2 years 9 months]
  • Anais Keff: b. 24 Feb 1869, Paris; d. 06 May 1887, Paris

Note that Pierre Jean Baptiste Keff and Jules Joseph Keff seem to have been born at almost exactly the same time: which I think means that they were either (a) twins, or (b) the same child but with two different names (we have a birth day for one and a death day for the other). I suspect that the latter of these two scenarios is the more likely.

Their great-grandchildren

Josephine Catherine Keff married Victor Pierre van de Casteele, but:

  • No children (as far as I can see)

At which point the entire Keff family tree seems to just disappear. 🙁

Note that Victor Pierre van de Casteele was born in Brest on 13 Sep 1847; married Mathilde Judith Jeanne Delphine RACQUE (RAQUE) in 1880 (they divorced in 1892); and died in Paris 14e Arrondissement in 1926 aged 79, or in Paris 20e Arrondissement in 1930 aged 83 (I’m not sure which of the two is correct). So it seem highly likely to me that he would have married Josephine Catherine Keff (16 years younger than him) in 1892 or later.

Are there any loose ends?

Jean Michel Keff, born in 1831, died as a 21-year-old marine infantryman in l’Hopital des Saintes on an island in the Guadeloupe archipelago. Note the main feature of this island was a military prison: so it’s entirely possible that he was in prison there, possibly for desertion (it was common at this time for young French military to try to run away to America). I also suspect that he may have joined the marines once his father died in 1848.

For Pierre Keff born in 1833, having served his sentence in Nouvelle Caledonie (which extended slightly for trying to escape), he was released in 11 Aug 1889. At his death, he was described as a widower of Catherine Derichelle (is that a Belgian surname?), but I have found no mention of any children.

For Catherine Keff born in 1835, there seems no mention of her as an Optant in 1872 (as part of the fallout from the Franco-Prussian War, people from the Moselle etc had to publicly declare their allegiance). And there is also no sign of marriage etc. Hence my suspicion here is that she simply died young and failed to get listed (there are some glaring holes in the Chateaurouge register, which makes me think that a number of pages got lost along the way).

Finally: I have worked hard to try to find any trace of Leon Pierre Jean Keff (1865-1900) beyond his birth and death, but have so far found nothing. He was an “imprimeur”, died while living at Impasse des Couronnes 5: but there is no mention of his having had a widow or wife (and no marriage in filae.com).

Thoughts, Nick?

To be fair, I suspect the main reason no genealogists seem to have picked up on this whole Keff family tree is simply because it fizzled out, leaving (of course) no modern branch looking back at it. Sure, the (modern) Lichtenbergers have Reine Lichtenberger on their tree, but as for her (apparently psychosexually-challenged) husband, there was no mention. Perhaps it wasn’t something that anyone really wanted to talk about, then or now.

Might there have been a specific reason why this branch of the Keffs disappeared? While it’s true that infant mortality in France in the 19th century was fairly dreadful, I think that that alone isn’t nearly enough to explain this whole story.

Beyond that, I really don’t know: but I do often think about how easily Sigmund Freud constructed his (frankly rather nutty) theories in response to the constant barrage of childhood traumas his patients presented him with. This was a brutal time to be young, where a less-than-perfect roll of Fate’s dice left you abused, or exploited, or just plain dead.

What force was driving Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre around Moselle, and from there to Paris? Was it ambition, or hunger, or need, or tragedy, or whim? I guess we’ll never know.

The Hunt for Edouard Keff continues…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

If you recall, a French journalist claimed that the real identity of mysterious wife murderer Henri Debosnys was in fact poetic fantasist Edward (Edouard) Keff: and that the journalist had been at the Lycee Charlemagne in Paris with Keff in 1845 (at the age of about 12).

Unfortunately, my previous efforts to trace any such Edouard Keff using (the usually pretty good) filae.com and (the often moderately frustrating) geneanet.org had proven unsuccessful. So I decided to approach the same hunt from a completely different angle…

How To Look For Someone Who Isn’t There

The French archives are pretty good, but they – like pretty much all archives ever – can have holes that seem (inevitably) to (not) contain the things you are trying to find. So: what I tried to do this time round was to look for a Keff family with a connection to Paris, but with a gap in their documented children around 1833.

Through filae.com, I found a Nicolas Keff born in Paris’ 5e Arrondissement on 12 Feb 1848, but who died on 28 Apr 1849. I also found a Pierre Keff who died in Paris’ 5e Arrondissement on 29 Aug 1848. From that, it seemed fairly likely that Pierre Keff had been Nicolas Keff’s father. Might I be able to find any older brothers or sisters born to the same father?

It didn’t take long to find Pierre Keff’s wife and most of their children (though note that most of the family trees I found on Geneanet were woefully incomplete). So here are the details I was able to dig up:

Pierre Keff & Catherine Andre

Pierre Keff

  • b. 21 Aug 1801, Hombourg, Moselle, to Jean Keff & Eve Weiss
  • d. 29 Aug 1848, Paris 5e Arrondissement

Catherine Andre

  • b. 10 Oct 1805 to Pierre Andre and Anne Marie Hamann
  • in 1894, living in Rue des Dames, 15e Arrondissement, Asnieres (Seine)

The two married on 20 Oct 1830, Hombourg-Haut, Moselle

Pierre Keff & Catherine Andre’s Children

Jean Keff

  • b. 1830, Hombourg Haut, Moselle.
  • d. 1830, Hombourg Haut, Moselle.

Jean Michel Keff

  • b. 23 Sep 1831, Hombourg Haut, Moselle.
  • d. 05 July 1853, Terre-de-Haut, Guadeloupe

Marguerite Keff

  • b. 15 May 1837, Bouzonville
  • d. 13 Jan 1843, Bouzonville

Therese Keff (an “artiste dramatique”)

  • b. 02 Apr 1839, Bouzonville
  • m. Joseph Claude Branciard (theatre director) [b. ~1836]
  • d. 1894

Jean Keff

  • b. 25 July 1841, Bouzonville

Elisabeth Keff

  • b. 11 April 1843, Bouzonville

Madelaine Keff

  • b. January 1844, Bouzonville
  • d. 13 January 1844

Joseph Keff

  • b. 30 Apr 1845, Bouzonville
  • d. 19 Jan 1846

[+ probably Nicolas Keff, as mentioned above]

Minding The Gap?

Having now looked at lots of French archives from around this time, marriage was often linked with / triggered by a birth in the same year as the wedding; and that this was then followed by the appearance of children every 1-2 years thereafter (but also, sadly, suffering a lot of infant mortality).

In the case of the Keff/Andre family, we see them both getting married and having their first child in 1830; and then having children in 1831, 1837, 1839, 1841, 1843, 1844, 1845, and probably 1848.

Now, I can’t easily prove that they had more children in the period 1832-1836 (but probably not in either Hombourg-Haut or Bouzonville, where the records seem to be pretty good): but I have to say that it does seem likely. But I can pretty much prove that they were in the 5e Arrondissement in 1848 (when Pierre died) and probably in Paris beyond that (because Catherine Andre ended up in the 15e Arrondissement in 1894).

All the same, that’s all that I was able to find by searching filae.com etc.

…But Here’s The Twist I Wasn’t Expecting

Even though I was being completely logical and sensible with all the above searching, I have to point out (somewhat annoyingly) that I was also being a complete idiot. Because the Jean Keff born on 25 July 1841 in Bouzonville was (if had stopped to think about it) also exactly the same Jean Keff who I had previously traced to the Bagne de Toulon and beyond: while his brother Pierre Keff (not listed above) who I had also traced to the Bagne de Toulon and beyond was born in 13 May 1833 in Chateaurouge, Moselle.

So, without even realising that that was what I was doing, I had actually reconstructed the rest of the Keff bagnards’ family tree sideways and upwards (note that I had already found a fair few of their children).

Hence my suspicion that Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre had more children in the 1832-1836 period turned out to be correct: and the place where they were living around then was almost certainly Chateaurouge (6km from Bouzonville, and 35km from Hombourg-Haut), where their son Pierre Keff was born.

Looking at children born in Chateaurouge around that time, there was also a Catherine Keff born there on 03 Apr 1835 (but the listing has no mention of who her parents were). Even so, if she had been born to Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre, she would have been their first-born daughter, so it would be entirely conventional to name her after her mother: hence I’d be utterly unsurprised if she was their daughter.

So we can probably extend the list of children’s birth years to 1830, 1831, 1833, (probably) 1835, 1837, 1839, 1841, 1843, 1844, 1845, and (probably) 1848.

Still Looking For Edouard Keff…

Putting all the above together, it seems entirely rational to me to wonder whether the same parents had an additional child called Edouard in Chateaurouge around 1832-1834, particularly given that we already know so much about that boy’s somewhat infamous brothers. Even so, I can’t help but feel that I’m now really really running out of source documents to trawl my way through, so what other documents might there be out there that can I go looking for now? That question, alas, is as far as I’ve got this time round. 🙁

Somerton Man: Latest News…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

I recently emailed FSSA (Forensic Science South Australia) for an update on their forensic investigation into the Somerton Man. They very kindly replied:

SA Police have carriage of the investigation to identify the Somerton Man. We have had a forensic case meeting recently in Adelaide involving Forensic Science SA, National DNA Program for Unidentified Human Remains and Missing People, and Major Crime Investigation Branch.  This has identified the sequence of a variety of forensic opportunities that will be implemented over the coming months in an effort to identify him.

This is, of course, excellent news, because it means that FSSA has determined that the Somerton Man’s exhumed remains do present a number of viable forensic opportunities to identify him, which they will be pursuing before very long.

At this point, all I can do is quote Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange“:

“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”

Antonio Guayneri’s De Balneis, transcribed…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

My last post discussed the various copies of Antonio Guayneri’s De Balneis still extant: since then, I have (with the kind help of Stefano Guidoni) managed to get phone scans of MS Torino 1200 (with the shelfmark H.II.16). I also found a nice site with solid information about Guayneri, including his epitaph from the Church of San Michele in Pavia, where he and his wife were buried:

Hippocrates medicae basis Galienus et Isach
Et quod Avicenna scivit humatur ibi
Haec est Antonius Guaynerius abditus arca
Philosophus medicae maximus artis honor
Famaque qua celebris par sibi nullus erat
Par sibi sola fuit veritate et nomine coniux
Antonia ut thalami sic tumulique comes
Hos Deus ad coelos exutos corpore traxit
Ne superis tantus abesset honor

Anyway, once I was able to see that the various versions of Guayneri’s text were broadly the same as each other (i.e. with only moderate differences), I transcribed the easiest one to read – which was the one that appears in the 1553 Giunta Venetian print edition – and placed my transcription on the Cipher Foundation site.

Naturally, this is where I started trying to make a breezy (i.e. Thorndike-style) translation of Guayneri’s five chapters, with the help of online translators and my schoolboy Latin: but given that I’m not in any way a full-on Latinist, a lot sits well beyond my abilities. 🙁

Rough Summary of Guayneri’s Five Chapters

Nonetheless, here’s a rough outline of the stuff I could make out:

  • Chapter 1 is a load of wretched pseudo-historical patron-facing waffle. (Sorry, but it is.)
  • Chapter 2 talks (after more waffle) about how the virtues of the waters change in May from limpid to green. This is like a lake in Macedonia that was reported by Pliny to change its virtues around the heliacal rising of Sirius (i.e. August-ish);
  • Chapter 3 talks about how the Marquis of Mantua’s numerous medical conditions were sorted out by going to the baths, and how good the baths are for gout, gammy knees, swellings, and even for a paralyzed hand. There’s a fountain in the corner of a stone wall that enabled people to have a shower: this shower even cured one man of his tinnitus. Oh, and it’s good for catarrh, asthma, colic, constipation. Oh, and it also helps urinary problems, kidney stones, menstruation, and with conception. Oh, and it’s also good for long-standing headaches, paralysis, convulsions, trembling, lethargy, colds, loss of smell, loss of taste, gum softening, chronic coughs, asthma, stomach problems, dropsy, worms, sciatica, gout, and skin infections.
  • Chapter 4 is just too tangled and difficult for me to make out, sorry. 🙁
  • Chapter 5 includes some abbreviated recipes for remedies, which are also way beyond my school Latin: “Vel facias fic. recip. ol ei myrti.olei masti. ann drach.j pulueris myrtillorum: cypres. bistor. masti. terrae sigil. ana. scrup.ij ceraeparum: & fiat vnguentum.“, for example, and “Vel facias sic. recip. vnguenti al. Gal. vnc.ij.camphorae & hoc vbi magna affuerit flamma. drach. ij. sanda. ru. spodij ro. ann vnc. 5. incorporentur simul parum aceti commiscendo : & hepati vnctio fiat.“, as well as the much fruitier” Syrupi item aceto. drach.ij.vel de ribes, de succo acetosae de acetositate citri : de lymonibus, de agresta, vel consimilis cum.drach.iij.aquae endi exhibere in aurora multum confert” It also describes how to make and administer clysters effectively. The author once again reminds you that you should go to these baths in May when their powers are at their strongest.

Thoughts, Nick?

Well, even if Chapter 4’s Latin is a bit too messy for me to properly summarise, I think it’s overall pretty clear that even though this is an interesting first-half-of-the-fifteenth-century balneological text, the chances of a structural mapping between it and the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13B section seem painfully close to zero. So I think we can probably rule this out as a 15th century source text. (There are several more I’ll be moving onto, this was only the first one on my list.)

At the same time, I will be unsurprised if the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13B turns out to have a broadly similar mix of balneology, patron-facing bumf, and annoyingly abbreviated recipes. So it certainly feels like I’m knocking on the right kind of door here, even if nobody was home on this particular occasion.

Triolets, Rondeaux, and Christine de Pisan

As an aside, Byron Deveson recently suggested in a comment here that the poem-like section in Q13 might possibly be a triolet, a (roughly-eight-line) repetitive poem form from the late Middle Ages.

A quick search revealed that it wasn’t technically called a triolet until nearer the end of the 15th century: and that before that it was a format only used for French language poems, and better known as a “rondel”.

Perhaps the most famous rondel poet was Christine de Pisan: though born in the Republic of Venice, she ended up in France with her father (who was an astrologer for Charles VI). She became a full-time French-language poet, often adapting the rondel’s 7-line or 8-line format to suit the needs of the poem at hand:

Dure chose est a soustenir
Quant cuer pleure et la bouche chante;
Et de faire dueil se tenir
Dure chose est a soustenir.
Faire le fault qui soustenir.
Veult honneur qui mesdisans hante,
Dure chose est a soustenir

(Translated rather nicely as)

Life’s a bitch, moving on with things,
Crying heart, with the songs so haunting,
Seeking help in what mourning brings.
Life’s a bitch, moving on with things.
Meeting needs, working hard, moody swings,
Honor’s mine, though the gossip’s daunting.
Life’s a bitch, moving on with things

Might this be what we see in the Voynich? Possibly, but it would (a) require the plaintext to be French, and (b) require a complicated enciphering system that was able to encipher the same plaintext in multiple quite different ways.

It’s perhaps (as I suggested a couple of years ago) more likely to be the poem by Claudian (370AD-404AD) (“Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi, / Fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis“) quoted by Ioannis et Iacobi de Dondis Patavinorum in their balneological work (also in Giunta). There, the first section runs like this:

Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi
fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis,
cum tua vel mutis tribuant miracula vocem,
cum tibi plebeius carmina dictet honos
et sit nulla manus, cuius non pollice ductae
testentur memores prospera vota notae:
nonne reus Musis pariter Nymphisque tenebor,
si tacitus soli praetereare mihi?
ludibrium quid enim fas est a vate relinqui
hunc qui tot populis pervolat ora locum?

Which the Loeb Classics translate as:

Fount that prolongest life for the dwellers in Antenor’s city, banishing by thy neighbouring waters all harmful fates, seeing that thy marvels stir utterance even in the dumb, that a people’s love bids poets to honour thee in song, and that there is no hand whose fingers have not traced for thee some lines in thankful witness of prayers granted, shall I not be held guilty alike by the Muses and the Nymphs if I alone sing not thy praises? How can a spot whose fame is on so many lips rightly be passed over by me in slighting silence?

Still, a fair few fifteenth century balneological texts to go yet…