The Rosetta StoneReport

One of the three Philomathean student authors of the 1858 Report. Hale and his co-author Samuel Huntington Jones were double fourth cousins once removed. Both descended from Lt. Samuel Hale and Mary Welles and from Benjamin Talcott and Sarah Hollister of Glastonbury, Connecticut, whose sons Benjamin and Jonathan Hale married the sisters Hannah and Sarah Talcott. Hale translated the Greek and Demotic texts and became the central figure in the surviving authorial presentation network, with a Christmas 1858 inscription addressed to Washington Irving and documented gifts to Mary Jane Hale Welles, Archibald Campbell Tait, his uncle Elias White Hale, Caroline Amelia Hale Morgan, and his parents Reuben Charles Hale and Sarah Jane Mills Hale. C060’s paired parental inscriptions are the first in the current census where he writes “Charles” in full rather than “Chas.” After Penn he entered the Episcopal ministry. At the Civil War-era Naval Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, he served as deputy chaplain under command chaplain Mason Noble and as acting assistant professor of mathematics from July 1863 to January 1865. Naval Academy records include a June 10, 1864 order assigning Hale to the practice ship USS Macedonian and an October 7, 1864 letter detaching him to resume his academy duties. He later pursued liturgical and Eastern Christian scholarship and became coadjutor bishop of Springfield in 1892. His later career explains the literary, naval, ecclesiastical, and scholarly circles through which several copies circulated.

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Morton carried out the Report’s hieroglyphic work and helped design its illustrations and decorative borders. He later became a prominent lecturer in physics and chemistry, chaired chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, and served from 1870 until his death as the first president of Stevens Institute of Technology. Morton later served as vice president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Morton’s 1892 firsthand recollection of the Rosetta project remains the principal account of its origins, collaboration, illustrations, and difficult chromolithographic production.

C063 adds a newly documented Morton-family circulation route: Alexander Hamilton “Hamilton” Morton, who presented the volume in New York in 1860, was the brother of Henry’s father, the Rev. Henry Jackson Morton, and therefore Henry Morton’s paternal uncle. The inscription date—December 11, 1860—was Henry’s twenty-fourth birthday, though the reason for that date remains unproved.

C089 preserves Henry Morton’s undated authorial presentation to Max Rosenthal, signed “with the sincere regards of Henry Morton.”

Born in Philadelphia on 13 June 1837, the son of the Hon. Joel Jones (1795–1860) and Eliza Perkins Sparhawk. Through his grandmother Elizabeth Huntington Jones (1774–1843), daughter of the Rev. Joseph Huntington of Coventry, Connecticut, he was a great-grandnephew of Samuel Huntington (1731–1796), signer of the Declaration of Independence. Through Joseph Huntington’s second wife, Elizabeth Hale of Glastonbury, he was also a double fourth cousin once removed of his co-author Charles Reuben Hale. Joel Jones was a Yale-educated lawyer, judge of the Philadelphia District Court, the first president of Girard College (1847–1849), and Mayor of Philadelphia (1849–1851), as well as a biblical scholar and prominent civic figure. Samuel entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1853, earned an A.M., and completed an LL.B. in 1861.

One of the three Philomathean student authors and writer of the Report’s historical introduction. As Moderator of the Philomathean Society and a member of the Rosetta Stone Committee, Jones framed the translation within the discovery of the Stone and the history of decipherment, complementing Hale’s language work and Morton’s hieroglyphic and visual work. He went on to practice law in Philadelphia. On January 10, 1859, he personally presented C037 to Philadelphia publisher George William Childs. The surviving signed letter makes that volume a documented authorial presentation rather than a later association. The existence of an authorial presentation copy signed by Jones alongside Hale and Morton situates him within a well-established Philadelphia legal and civic family, in contrast to his previously thin documentation among the Report’s three authors.

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A Polish-born American artist who studied lithography, drawing, and painting before settling in Philadelphia. Penn’s catalog credits Max Rosenthal and Henry Morton with the Report’s decorative borders, while Louis N. Rosenthal’s establishment printed the volume. Max later became known for portraits, etchings, and ambitious lithographic work and was active in Philadelphia’s artistic community. Separating the brothers clarifies artistic design from shop production.

C089 preserves Henry Morton’s undated authorial presentation to Max Rosenthal, signed “with the sincere regards of Henry Morton.”

The Philomathean student who presented the Society with a plaster cast of the Rosetta Stone near the close of the 1855–56 college year and read an essay on hieroglyphic research—an event that sparked the translation project. He later became an Episcopal clergyman and gave C041 to a woman identified in the inscription as his friend and parishioner.

A Polish-born lithographer whose Philadelphia establishment printed the Report. Contemporary cataloging and surviving imprints distinguish Louis’s production role from the artistic contribution of his younger brother Max Rosenthal. Henry Morton’s firsthand account describes repeated color presswork and close collaboration with the lithographic shop. Later Chicago records identify Louis as a paper dealer at 163 LaSalle Street. An obituary reports that he died in Chicago on January 20, 1902, in his seventy-eighth year, after living on Vincennes Avenue, and was buried at Waldheim Cemetery.

The inscription identifies only a son named Alexander. George Wharton Pepper explicitly stated in 1925 that he did not know who this Alexander was. No surviving evidence yet supplies a surname or establishes his relationship to Ernest Zantzinger. The census retains the name without converting it into an unsupported identification.

C061 bears a clearly legible penciled ownership inscription: “G. B. Allinson / Phila. Jan. 7/59.” The inscription establishes an owner using those initials in Philadelphia on January 7, 1859.

McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory for 1847 lists George B. Allinson as a civil engineer on Locust Street above Schuylkill Eighth, at the same address as Samuel Allinson. George does not appear in the 1856 directory’s Allinson entries, while Samuel is listed at 356 Walnut Street. The Allinson Family Papers at Haverford document a substantial Philadelphia-area Quaker family but do not supply a direct link between George B. Allinson and this book. George is therefore the leading candidate, not a confirmed identification.

A Philadelphia insurance agent and son of Charles Nicoll Bancker. He received C015 from his niece Ellen Maria Camac on his thirty-eighth birthday. The embossed J.A.B. shield-and-wings ownership stamp independently supports the reading of the recipient’s name where the inscription had previously been uncertain.

A University of Pennsylvania graduate and senior partner in the banking firm Thomas A. Biddle & Co. The 1897 notice describing Julia Biddle’s bequest of her husband’s finely bound books closely matches this copy’s elaborate late-nineteenth-century rebinding, but no personal ownership inscription survives.

A physician and descendant of the prominent Philadelphia Binney family. He was the great-grandson of jurist Horace Binney. His identity and Wellesley residence help establish that the donor notes refer to his widow, Harriet Cutler Cunningham Binney, rather than another woman using the same formal name.

Born in Philadelphia and educated at Yale, Binney became a prominent member of the Philadelphia bar. During the Civil War he served as president of the Philadelphia Sanitary Commission and of the Union League. C069’s New Year’s Day 1859 inscription to William Seymour Tyler is signed “Horace Binney Jr.” and describes Tyler as the presenter’s friend. The identification has been independently authenticated: Amherst College compared the signature with a near-contemporary Horace Binney letter preserved in the William Seymour Tyler Papers and confirmed a match.

The “Doctor Brugsch” named in Humboldt’s letter is Heinrich Ferdinand Karl Brugsch. He published major work on Demotic writing while still very young and was encouraged by Alexander von Humboldt. He later became one of the central German Egyptologists of the nineteenth century.

His appearance in the inserted facsimile is part of the book’s intellectual context; it does not create a person-to-copy relationship.

A member of the extended Bancker–McIlvaine family and the niece of James Albert Bancker through her mother, Henrietta Maria Bancker McIlvaine. Her February 4, 1859 inscription records a family birthday gift made only weeks after publication, giving C015 a clearly documented domestic rather than institutional origin.

A major Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist who became proprietor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and developed it into one of the country’s influential newspapers. Childs was also a prominent civic benefactor and moved among leading writers, politicians, and cultural figures. Samuel Huntington Jones’s signed January 10, 1859 presentation letter places C037 directly within Childs’s early publishing and cultural network.

Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Maryland when this copy was presented to him in Baltimore on March 5, 1859. The unidentified presenter inscribed “ex dono amicitiae,” or “as a gift of friendship,” making C020 a direct presentation to a nineteenth-century scientist.

The C046 gift inscription reads: "Revd. H. C. Swentzel / With kind regards of / John Cooper, M.D.; M.R.C.S. Eng. / 1895." The presenter is strongly identified as Brooklyn physician Dr. John Cooper, listed in a period medical directory at 79 St. James Place with the qualification "M.R.C.S.L., 1837" — matching the inscription’s "M.R.C.S. Eng." No further biographical detail has yet been established beyond this directory record.

Founder and first regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. Beginning in the 1850s, she led the national effort that purchased and preserved George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Her 1872 inscription to Charles C. Jones records a later association gift from one major American antiquarian figure to another.

Born February 7, 1797, Ducachet trained as a physician before entering the Episcopal ministry. He became the second rector of St. Stephen’s Church in Philadelphia in 1834 and remained there until his death in 1865. His signed C049 ownership inscription is dated February 7, 1859—his sixty-second birthday. The date establishes early ownership but does not reveal whether the volume was purchased, received as a gift, or acquired in another way. The 1859 Philomathean catalog lists the Rev. Henry William Ducachet as an honorary member and separately lists his son, Henry William Ducachet Jr., among the regular members.

C091 is inscribed “Henry E. Duncan Jr / from / his father / H. E. D. / Christmas 1896.” The giver was the Rev. Henry Erskine Duncan, born in New York City on April 7, 1824. A graduate of the University of the City of New York (1844) and the General Theological Seminary (1847), he was rector of St. Paul’s, Eastchester, and of the Church of the Holy Innocents, West Point, and then for nearly twenty years rector at Fishkill Landing and Matteawan, New York, of St. Anna’s, which became St. Luke’s. From 1878 he was rector of Grace Church in Union County, New Jersey. The University of Pennsylvania awarded him the honorary degree of D.D. in 1872.

In 1848 he married his first cousin Catharine Ann Bartow of Pelham. He died in 1904 and is buried at St. Luke’s Church, Beacon, New York.

His father, the Rev. Henry Erskine Duncan, D.D., inscribed C091 “Henry E. Duncan Jr / from / his father / H. E. D. / Christmas 1896.” Henry Erskine Duncan was born on June 28, 1857, in what is now Beacon, New York, the only son of the Rev. Henry Erskine Duncan and Catharine Ann Bartow. He married Agnes Elizabeth, who died in 1933. He died in 1948 and is buried with her in St. Luke’s churchyard, Beacon.

Wife of Edward Everett—Massachusetts governor, U.S. secretary of state, and Harvard president—and mother of William Everett. The 1859 date, social context, and the volume’s subsequent ownership by William make Charlotte the strongest identification for “Mrs. Everett.” Because the inscription gives no first name, the attribution remains explicitly qualified.

Harvard Class of 1859 and the youngest son of Edward and Charlotte Everett. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard Law School; taught Latin at Harvard; served as master of Adams Academy; and represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House. The copy’s bookplate and acquisition note establish that he gave it to Harvard on September 25, 1878.

Named in the presentation inscription as "Mrs. Lucy S. Faxon," recipient of a Christmas 1858 gift from her nephew Charles R. Hale. Published genealogical records identify Lucy and Hale’s mother, Sarah Jane Mills Hale, as daughters of Jedediah Wells Mills and Sarah Seymour, independently corroborating the relationship.

A Philadelphia lawyer, writer, historian, and philanthropist with strong interests in Pennsylvania history and cultural institutions. Fisher graduated from Harvard in 1825, was admitted to the Philadelphia bar in 1829 but never practiced, and became an incorporator of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society on April 19, 1833, and sympathized with the Confederacy during the Civil War. APS proceedings for June 18, 1841 record Fisher presenting eleven rare Cotton Mather tracts dating from 1699–1725 at the same meeting where Henry D. Gilpin separately donated historical documents — placing both men within the same APS bibliophilic circle, though this does not by itself establish a personal relationship or explain Gilpin’s 1859 presentation of C006 to Fisher. Fisher’s daughters Sophia and Maria married Eckley Brinton Coxe and Brinton Coxe; his son Henry Middleton Fisher married Mary Elwyn Wharton, daughter of C080 owner Henry Wharton. These genealogical links provide family context, not a provenance chain for C006. The mechanism and date of the later Fisher-to-Philomathean transfer remain undocumented.

Twice elected mayor of Washington, D.C. (1836–1840), Force spent decades assembling what became known as the Peter Force Library, which contained more than 60,000 items, in support of his unfinished documentary project, American Archives. Congress purchased his library in 1867, and it became a foundation collection of the Library of Congress. C075 was his personal copy, presented to him by John Jay Smith.

Daughter of physician and Indian agent John Sibley, widow of Louisiana senator Josiah Stoddard Johnston, and wife of U.S. attorney general Henry D. Gilpin. Contemporary accounts described her intellectual influence and remembered the Gilpin home as a resort of artists, connoisseurs, and distinguished visitors. She later chaired a major women’s committee at Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair. Her January 1, 1859 inscription connects C003 to the Gilpins’ cultivated literary and political circle; her May 21, 1859 inscription in C055 records a gift to her grandson William Stoddard Johnston II. The New Year 1859 “E. Gilpin” inscription in C096 is probably hers.

Because both editions carry the same chromolithographed dedication leaf naming him, Gilpin appears in the front matter of every one of the 96 first-edition copies documented in this census, and every second-edition copy as well — not only the two copies specifically linked to his household below. He served as the fourteenth Attorney General of the United States under Martin Van Buren (1840–1841), argued the government’s side of the Amistad case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and edited the three-volume Papers of James Madison, purchased from Dolley Madison and published by order of Congress. He was president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1852 to 1859 — spanning the years both editions of the Report were dedicated to him. The Philomathean Society’s moderator roll lists him as its twenty-third moderator. Beyond that universal presence as dedicatee, the current reading identifies him personally as the giver of C006, and his wife Eliza’s 1859 gift of C055 to her grandson places that copy directly within the Gilpins’ household and family circle.

A Philadelphia merchant whose wife Emeline is identified as the recipient of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Kittera Conrad’s copy. Conrad was the Philomathean student whose presentation of a Rosetta Stone cast helped inspire the translation project. City-directory and census evidence places the Godfrey household within the Philadelphia and Germantown world in which Thomas Kittera Conrad later served as a clergyman.

Identified through Philadelphia directories, census research, and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Kittera Conrad’s parish network as the “Mrs. B. G. Godfrey” named in the inscription. She was the wife of merchant Benjamin G. Godfrey. Her copy creates a remarkable link between Thomas Kittera Conrad—the student whose presentation of a Rosetta Stone cast helped inspire the project—and the finished book.

A daughter of Josiah Quincy III and sister of Maria Sophia Quincy. She married Benjamin Daniel Greene, a Harvard-educated botanist, traveler, and patron of science. The inscription’s “Mrs. M. Greene” most plausibly identifies Margaret as the 1859 recipient. The married name and accompanying Quincy initials make the identification strong. Margaret’s mother, Eliza Susan Morton Quincy, was the sister of Henry Morton’s paternal grandfather Jacob Morton, making Margaret Henry’s first cousin once removed.

Von der Hagen was a pioneering scholar of medieval German literature, a professor at the University of Berlin, and an editor and translator associated especially with the Nibelungenlied. The Berlin wrapper mounted in C069 is addressed to "Professor von der Hagen" at "Louisenstrasse No. 23." The official 1841 Berlin address directory lists "v. Hagen, F., Dr., erb. Prof. d. phil. Fakultät a. d. Univers., Louisenstr. 23" — an exact match with name, title, and street address confirming Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen as the wrapper’s recipient. The separate manuscript note signed "A V Humboldt" mounted alongside the wrapper is recorded elsewhere in this census as a probable, not formally authenticated, Humboldt autograph — a distinct question from the wrapper’s confirmed addressee.

Born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, the son of Yale-educated lawyer Elias W. Hale Sr. (1775–1832). Attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School from October 1846 to 1848 under preceptor Dr. Joseph B. Ard and received his M.D. in 1848. Returned to Lewistown and practiced medicine in Mifflin and Centre Counties, Pennsylvania, for the rest of his life, with brief service in the emergency Pennsylvania militia in 1863. A genealogical record for his brother, Reuben Charles Hale (1812–1863), lists Elias White Hale as a sibling alongside Mary Jane Hale Welles and Caroline Amelia Hale Morgan — confirming him as report author Charles R. Hale’s uncle, exactly as the C056 inscription states.

The father of author Charles Reuben Hale. He was a Pennsylvania lawyer and public official whose career included federal service in Philadelphia and later service as quartermaster general of Pennsylvania. His gift to Yale librarian Edward C. Herrick shows the older Hale generation helping circulate the students’ work among established scholars. C060 preserves his son’s direct 1858 presentation to him, signed “Charles R. Hale” in full.

He was also president of the Tyrone and Clearfield Railroad from 1860 until his death in 1863, succeeding his first cousin James Tracy Hale, who had held the same office 1856–1858 (their fathers, Elias White Hale and Reuben Hale of Towanda, were brothers). Reuben Charles Hale’s presidency ended in the same year he died, matching the office’s recorded succession to George Brooke Roberts in 1863 — a documented family succession in the railroad’s own leadership, sourced to Coverdale & Colpitts (1946) and Bezilla & Gette, Branch Line Empires (Indiana University Press, 2017).

The mother of author Charles Reuben Hale. C060 preserves her son’s Christmas 1858 presentation to “Sarah Jane Hale,” signed simply “Charles—.” The inscription is one of the first two examples in the current census where Hale writes “Charles” in full rather than “Chas.”

Named in the inscription as "cousin of Charles R. Hale," recipient of the book as a gift from Julia Faxon. Independently documented as the wife of George Wells Harris and mother of the philosopher Marjorie Silliman Harris, the family lived in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Published lineage records identify her father, Charles Seymour Mills, as a brother of Hale’s mother, Sarah Jane Mills Hale, independently establishing the first-cousin relationship.

An American archaeologist and pioneering field photographer, Haynes served as field director of the Nippur excavations (1888–1900), America’s first Mesopotamian dig, and has been called the father of American archaeological photography. He later worked for the University of Pennsylvania Museum, creating a genuine institutional Penn connection. A 1905 nervous breakdown led to his institutionalization, and he died in 1910; his 1908 gift of C047 to Lythgoe falls within that decline and reads as a colleague’s parting gesture.

An early owner of C078, identified by her inscription: "Maria A. Hemphill." A second, fainter line of graphite beneath it is not confidently legible; it may read "West Chester, Pa." and a name beginning "John H," but neither the transcription nor her identity is established. Not identified beyond the inscription itself.

Born February 24, 1811, Herrick never attended Yale as a student: chronic eye disease prevented a collegiate course. Yale nevertheless awarded him an honorary A.M. in 1838 for his independently acquired scholarship. He became Yale’s first full-time librarian, serving from 1843 to 1858, and college treasurer from 1852 until his death in 1862. He also helped establish systematic meteor observation in the United States. Reuben Charles Hale’s January 21, 1859 gift therefore reached an accomplished scientist and bibliographer whose Yale standing was earned without an undergraduate degree.

Henry Bainbridge Hoff was the son of Commander Henry Kuhn Hoff. Penn’s 1858–59 catalog and the published Philomathean Society membership history place him at the University and in the Society precisely when the Report appeared. He therefore supplies the most likely route by which his father obtained C036 before presenting it to Dr. Charles D. Meigs. No surviving inscription records the father-son transfer, so that step remains a strong inference rather than a documented handoff.