Reviewed by Leslie Lindsay

I’ve a portrait of my Appalachian great-grandmother on my desk. Her lengthy, graying hair is pulled again right into a bun. She wears glasses and a plaid blazer, additionally, a smirk. For years, I’ve puzzled what was behind that grin, tucked in these chiseled cheekbones, the identical ones that fashioned mine.

Once I got here throughout Jeremy B. Jones’s Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries (Blair, September 2025), I knew I wanted to learn it. Found in a field on the curb in 1975, a person unearthed dozens of hand-sewn notebooks. The home was set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. However then, he thumbed by the fragile pages, discovered them written in code, and knew he had discovered one thing value saving. He then took them to a retired cryptanalyst who deciphered them, and when he did, a white Southern farmer and schoolteacher, William T. Prestwood, got here to life. Jeremy B. Jones, the four-times great-grandson of Prestwood, father, author, and professor got down to perceive the person behind the diaries.

At first, they seemed to be an Everyman’s accounting of his days. He longed for a lady named Mary Norwood, like actually wished her, badly. But it surely appears even within the early 1800s, ladies performed hard-to-get. He calculated planetary orbits, learn algebra and Goethe, recorded eclipses, and broke into barn lofts and closets and behind fence posts with dozens of lovers. He wished to get married, journey, or educate.

However actually, the reader of the diaries is left with so many extra questions than solutions. Simply who was William T. Prestwood? What secrets and techniques and worries did he carry? How was his life the identical — but completely different than the lives of our future generations?

I used to be utterly mesmerized as I learn the accounts of this man, that are interspersed and juxtaposed with items from Jones’s present-day life as a father. I discovered his tales of his two younger boys, fatherhood, marriage, place and emplacement, social and political conventions very resonant and well timed, even 2 hundred years later. The weaving and connecting of those moments is nothing wanting genius.

Like with my very own great-grandmother, I’ve develop into a bit obsessed. Why do our forebearers seize a lot curiosity? Are we in search of kinship in probably the most literal method? Perhaps it’s one thing a couple of line of males or ladies strolling the identical, but completely different path? Jones, not having been one to maintain a journal, begins writing letters to William. In fact, he gained’t obtain a response, however he gleans higher readability about himself, about his household, the current household, and those who got here earlier than.

Cipher comprises a lot lyrical precision, deep emotional fact, and even drama, I discovered it onerous to place down. From romps within the fields with numerous ladies, the Path of Tears, on a regular basis farming, there may be one secret — and it’s a doozy — Jones dwells and speculates upon that left an enduring impression for me. This can be a guide like no different — half historical past, part-mystery, part-memoir, that so many can be clamoring for an opportunity to unearth a few of their very own darkish household secrets and techniques, perhaps in journals, diaries, or pictures.

As for Cora Bell, my very own great-grandmother, I’ve a way she may need discovered herself in these pages, felt a kinship with William, walked equally dusty paths, and whispered to me, her descendant, that point and reminiscence and place are usually not ever actually gone, however stay inside.