Between the pages: the boy, the poem, and a riddle - Part 3

Found in an old children's sunday school book, a popular poem and ballad was handwritten on a folded piece of paper. The transcriber? A mystery.

They chose to sign their name in code.

Photo by Jamanix Books. Used with permission.

Since I had researched the poem, "Young Charlotte," I knew that the original author was Elizabeth Oaks Smith. The letters of her name did not fit the characters in the code. Therefore, it is my theory that the coded name is the name of the person who copied the poem in pencil on the page.

The number "4" that appears may indicate the word "for" and that the second line is who the transcriber wrote the poem for.

An inspection of all parts of the paper revealed two names handwritten on the back.

Mrs. G. N. Buskey (or Bushey?) was written in pencil.

Phoebe V. Lory was written in ink on another part of the page.

An inspection of the coded attribution revealed that the number of characters on the first line fit Phoebe V. Lory perfectly.

I knew that it would take me ages to crack the code and it didn't look like any language commonly known. So I message my niece, Chloe. She is a kind of super sleuth when it comes to linguistics and languages.

She agreed that Phoebe V. Lory fit and believed that the letter 'e' appeared several times in the second line. The last word on the second line appeared to start and end with 'L.' However, the coded letter that we thought was 'o' wouldn't make sense with the placement of the e's in the first word. A mistake? maybe.

Chloe's father recognized the code as one he learned as a kid and drew this:

I researched the cipher my brother-in-law wrote and found that it is called a "Pigpen Cipher." The cipher was created hundreds of years ago. It appeard in the book "De Furtivis Literarum Notis" published in 1591 and later used by Freemasons.

Accessed at Audio Cipher (https://www.audiocipher.com/post/types-of-ciphers).

There were variations in what I found online and what my brother-in-law wrote. I realized that the person who wrote the code on the paper I had may have had their own variation. Going with the theory that the first line spelled out Phoebe V. Lory, my niece told me she believed the second line may be Emmie or Effie Leer.

No Pigpen Cipher that I have been able to find fits the characters written on the paper with the poem that would spell out "Phoebe V. Lory." However, because her name was handwritten on the backside of the paper, and the number of characters and the repetive 'e' fell in the right placement to spell out Phoebe, I believe her cipher was a variation of the Pigpen Cipher. She made her own Pigpen Cipher and may have scrambled the letters of the alphabet. If this were a child's communication tool, she may have created random placement of letter within the pigpen cipher pattern and shared it with a friend.

I then considered a second theory - The possibility that there was a cipher within a cipher.

I believe it is entirely possible that 1) our mystery writer used their own version of the Pigpen cypher thus further complicating anyone's ability to crack it. 2) Since the writer of the poem made so many errors in their transcription of the poem, it is possible this was simply a child playing around and made a random cipher (with no pattern).

Either way, we knew we had the "e" in the right place. Even if my niece Chloe and I couldn't figure out Phoebe's cipher, we could use deductive reasoning to guess the name below. The only thing that made sense at the time is that the first name had an error in the second and third letters and spelled out Effie, Emmie or Ellie. With the last name Leer being likely, I was off on another history detective rabbit trail. (I can't wait to tell you what I discovered!)

But first, be sure to read my next post here.

#historydetective