News & Ideas

Calling All Cryptologists!

Here are three notes written in a code that no one at the Schlesinger Library has been able to break.

Long before Cynthia Anthonsen Foster became a civil rights, peace, and social activist, she was a teenage girl living in Ashby, Massachusetts. Deeply embedded in one of the 68 boxes of papers she started donating to the Schlesinger in 1986—among love letters sent to her by her high school sweetheart, Kenneth R. Miller, in 1921—is a curious find: three notes written in a code that no one at the library has been able to break.

We’re reproducing the mystery messages here in the hope that someone in our readership will be able to decode them.

Do you have a lead for us? E-mail cara_raskin@radcliffe.harvard.edu.

And what of Cynthia and Kenneth’s romance? After a passionate period, their relationship transitioned into a friendship, and the collection includes 60 years of correspondence between them.

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