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 documented gifts to Washington Irving, 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.

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.

Because both editions carry the same chromolithographed dedication leaf naming him, Gilpin appears in the front matter of every one of the 90 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 yet 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.

The inscription’s “Comd. Hoff. U.S.N.” identifies Henry K. Hoff with compelling specificity. He had been a naval officer since 1823, commanded USS Independence, and returned from senior Pacific Squadron duty in 1858. In 1859 he was assigned to USS Princeton at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Hoff later served during the Civil War, rose to rear admiral, and commanded the North Atlantic Squadron. His son Henry Bainbridge Hoff was a Penn senior and Philomathean Society member when the Report appeared, providing the missing direct route between the book and Commander Hoff. The exact father-son handoff is inferred, but the presenter’s identity is strongly established.

The internationally celebrated Prussian scientist praised the Philomathean committee’s independent work in a letter dated March 12, 1859. Five first-edition copies preserve manuscript-style, printed, tipped-in, pasted-in, or bound-in facsimiles, translations, and associated reception material. Those appearances remain documented in their copy records but are not counted as person-to-copy relationships.

C069 separately preserves a German manuscript dated February 4, 1841 and signed “A V Humboldt,” with an addressed Berlin wrapper to Professor von der Hagen. The census records that manuscript as attributed to Humboldt; no independent handwriting authentication has yet been established.

The elder Humboldt brother was a statesman and scholar associated with language, education, and the development of the modern research-university ideal. Alexander’s letter reproduced in C062 refers to his brother while discussing the history of hieroglyphic study.

He is part of the inserted document’s intellectual genealogy, not an owner or associate of the physical copy. The facsimile mention therefore does not create a person-to-copy relationship.

One of the first American writers to achieve an international reputation. Irving is best remembered for “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but he also wrote history and biography and served as a United States diplomat. At Sunnyside in Tarrytown, he lived in the same neighborhood as Charles R. Hale’s aunt Caroline Amelia Hale Morgan and her husband George D. Morgan. Irving inscribed a copy of The Sketch Book to Caroline at Christmas 1856—exactly two years before Hale presented C001 to Irving at Christmas 1858. George D. Morgan later served as one of Irving’s pallbearers. That neighborhood and family connection places Hale’s gift within an established personal circle during the final year of Irving’s life.

Johnston was raised and educated in the Philadelphia household of his grandmother Eliza and her second husband, Henry D. Gilpin. C055 records Eliza’s gift to him on May 21, 1859. His father, William Stoddard Johnston I, had been a nominal Philomathean member in 1834.

Born in Savannah and educated partly in Philadelphia, where his father held church posts, Jones earned an A.B. from Princeton in 1852 and a law degree from Harvard in 1855. He served as mayor of Savannah from 1860 to 1861 and, during the Civil War, as a Confederate lieutenant colonel and chief of artillery for the military district of Georgia. After the war he became a prominent memorialist of the Confederate "Lost Cause" and one of the most productive historians of 19th-century Georgia, sometimes called "the Macaulay of the South" for an output of roughly eighty works, including Antiquities of the Southern Indians and History of Georgia. He was also a noted collector of autographs and manuscripts. Cunningham's inscription calls him her friend and dates the gift at Mount Vernon on July 19, 1872 — fourteen years after publication. A newly identified family network explains that connection: Jones's second wife, Eva Berrien Eve, was the daughter of Philoclea Edgeworth Casey Eve, Cunningham's own cousin and the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association's Georgia Vice Regent, who personally handled donor correspondence for the campaign under the pseudonym "The Committee." Eva Eve had been a bridesmaid at Jones's first wedding in 1858 before becoming his second wife in 1863.

The C046 presentation label abbreviates his name as “H. Baxter Liebler.” Ordained in 1914, Liebler spent 25 years at St. Saviour's Church in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, before leaving at age 53 to found St. Christopher's Mission to the Navajo at Bluff, Utah, in 1943. He learned Navajo beforehand, wore a traditional Navajo hairstyle, and incorporated Navajo Beauty Way elements into his liturgy, building a free-standing altar facing east to satisfy both Anglican and Navajo custom — possibly the first U.S. church to do so. He founded the area's only school, serving roughly 1,500 Navajo, and later a hospital and clinic that saw about 500 births after opening in 1956. He retired in 1962 but remained active, founding the Hat Rock Valley Retreat Center and St. Mary of the Moonlight Chapel in Monument Valley, Arizona (1966–71), where he died in 1982. He wrote three books: Moccasin Tracks, When We Look Around Us, and Boil My Heart for Me. The route into his possession of C046 and the date of his gift remain unresolved.

The acquisition note reads “g. of Dr. John Logue, 7/84.” The leading and probable identification is Dr. John J. Logue (1923–2004), the Villanova University political-science professor and founder of the World Order Research Institute, later the Common Heritage Institute. He was a Philadelphia-area academic, held a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and was active when Temple recorded the July 1984 gift — facts that make him substantially more plausible than the unrelated physicians and academics found in broad name searches.

No record yet explicitly connects him to this volume. The identification remains probable pending Temple's accession register, donor file, or correspondence.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lythgoe took a Harvard A.M. in 1897 before continuing his studies at the University of Bonn. He became the first curator of Egyptian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1902, and in 1906 J. Pierpont Morgan recruited him to become the Metropolitan Museum's founding curator of Egyptian Art, a post he held until 1929. He directed the Met's excavations at Lisht and released key staff to assist Howard Carter with the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. John Henry Haynes gave him C047 in 1908, making the volume part of the department's formative scholarly history.

One of nineteenth-century America’s most influential obstetricians. Meigs graduated in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, became professor of obstetrics and diseases of women at Jefferson Medical College in 1841, and served as president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. His books helped shape American obstetrical teaching. His legacy is also controversial: he resisted the use of anesthesia in childbirth and rejected emerging evidence that physicians’ hands could transmit puerperal fever.

C059's name, Montgomery crest and “Garde Bien” motto, Philadelphia context, and date range strongly identify the owner as John Teackle Montgomery. The official Philomathean alumni list records John T. Montgomery as a nominal member in 1835, and American Philosophical Society authority data gives his full name and life dates. He married Alida Gouverneur Wharton in 1856; published Wharton genealogy identifies her as a first cousin of C080 owner Henry Wharton. The identification remains qualified pending repository confirmation or direct bookplate comparison.

A University of Pennsylvania graduate, Philadelphia lawyer, and documented member of the Philomathean Society. He was the father of Fannie Brock Montgomery’s husband and therefore her father-in-law. That relationship gives the probable donor a clear Philomathean family context, but it does not establish that William ever owned C048.

The sister of Reuben Charles Hale and paternal aunt of author Charles Reuben Hale. C051 preserves Hale’s Christmas 1858 presentation to her. Her marriage to George D. Morgan also connects that authorial gift to the Morgan family context documented by C021 and to the network surrounding C001.

A New York merchant whose marriage to Caroline Amelia Hale made him an uncle by marriage within Charles R. Hale's family network. His cousin and business partner Edwin D. Morgan served as governor of New York from 1859 to 1862 and then as a United States senator. At New Year's 1859 George presented a copy of the Report to his brother, Rev. William F. Morgan. Welles—his own brother-in-law and the sitting Secretary of the Navy—appointed him purchasing agent for the Union Navy in 1861, an assignment that became known as "the Morgan Purchases" and drew a Senate nepotism inquiry. Independently of that appointment, Morgan was Washington Irving's neighbor and friend at Sunnyside; Irving inscribed a copy of The Sketch Book to Morgan's wife at Christmas 1856. George also helped promote the village’s 1854 renaming as Irvington in Irving’s honor, was associated with Irving through the same Tarrytown savings bank, and served as one of Irving's eight pallbearers at his December 1859 funeral.

The brother of George D. Morgan and recipient of the New Year’s 1859 gift. The affectionate inscription records a family exchange rather than an author’s direct presentation, while the Morgan–Hale marriage places the gift within Charles R. Hale’s extended family network.

Effingham Buckley Morris graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with the Class of 1875, appearing by name in the University's own 1875 Record of that class. He began his legal career with P. Pemberton Morris and became general attorney of the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company and counsel of the Girard Trust Company before his election as the Girard Trust's president in 1887, a position he held for forty-one years while its assets grew enormously. He was the youngest elected director of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and served as a University of Pennsylvania trustee from 1911 to 1921, receiving an honorary degree from the University in 1928.

His ownership inscription, "Effingham B. Morris / U. of Pa / 1875," appears on the dedication leaf of C082, evidently added not long after his graduation.

Generally known as Hamilton Morton, he was a New York lawyer, joined the New York Yacht Club in 1849, served as its secretary from 1859 to 1871, and later became an honorary member. He died unmarried.

Compiled Morton family records identify him and the Rev. Henry Jackson Morton as sons of Jacob Morton and Catherine Ludlow Morton. The National Academy of Sciences identifies Rev. Henry Jackson Morton as the father of report author Henry Morton. This establishes Hamilton—not merely another man with the surname—as Henry Morton’s paternal uncle.

C063 records Hamilton’s presentation to Charles Wm. Van Benthuysen in New York on December 11, 1860. That date was Henry Morton’s twenty-fourth birthday; the coincidence is documented, but its purpose is not.