I’ve been spending quite a few hours lately going through boxes from the Rochester municipal archives, a source that’s extremely unorganized and inaccessible but, if you can manage it, full of historical treasures.
While looking through the inventory lists, a series of boxes labeled “Bertillon identification cards” caught my eye. Alphonse Bertillon was a French anthropologist who invented the modern-day police mug shot as part of a criminal identification suite known as the Bertillon system. Police officers paired photographs with a detailed listing of physical measurements and features, creating a vast paper inventory that, if consulted properly, would help narrow down the search for suspects. The Cleveland Police Museum has a good summary on its website, if you’d like to learn more.
The first U.S. cities started using the Bertillon system in the late 1890s; Rochester joined them in October 1902. It was moved to do so after the January 1902 murder of Bela Brown. “Because of out-of-date methods the hunt for the Brown murderers cost a great deal more time than it otherwise would have,” the Democrat and Chronicle reported.
It continued:
When a bad crook is captured he is photographed in two or more positions and measured according to the metric system. Every part of the body is measured and the figures are recorded on special blanks for that purpose, which are uniform all over the world. The photographs are mounted on these blanks, which are of stiff cardboard, similar to photograph cards.
Democrat and Chronicle Oct. 21, 1902
At least 16 overstuffed boxes of those cards exist today in the municipal archives.1 Each card tells an incredible story about the person and the community in which they lived. Behold:
The backs have more detail about the arrest as well as other information. Take for example Luigi Catalano, a 52-year-old laborer from Italy who was arrested for vagrancy in 1918 and then stabbed to death 13 years later (click on the image to expand).
A very few of the cards represent criminals who were notorious in their time, at least as far as the authorities were concerned. Jesse Leroy Chamberlain’s thick file was held together with an ancient rubber band that crumbled as soon as I picked it up. Most of his arrests, ranging from 1919 to his death in 1956, were for intoxication or vagrancy, but he also merited an incredible wanted description from the FBI: “Stocky build, no teeth, ruddy complexion, large stomach, slouchy dress, smooth talker, claims to be a street preacher of the gospel. … Is known to be a thief and forger. Sometimes traveling with his brother and wife (deaf mutes).”
I realized quickly that red ink indicated that the person had died — sometimes, like convicted murderer Patrick Murphy, in lurid fashion.
He’s no relation of mine. Neither is Charles Murphy, whose card gave the most remarkable story out of those that I saw (a tiny fraction of them all). He was arrested for second-degree rape in October 1928 and quickly pleaded guilty — then six months later was appointed to the Rochester Police Department, where he served as a patrolman for 27 years.
To repeat, these are only a few cards I pulled at random from hundreds inside one of 16 large cardboard boxes. It seems like a dream project for a graduate student in history to categorize these thousands and thousands of cards, creating an inimitable survey of a part of Rochester society that is not often captured in history books.2
- Boxes X01149 through X01164, to be precise. ↩︎
- Here is one example I could find of a scholar using them in a similar way — in Minneapolis in this case, cataloging the arrests of Black women suspected to be prostitutes. ↩︎
