Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret

In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy. About a century later, a man stumbled upon these hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition. He passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offer an intimate window into the life of a man who passed his days recording eclipses, dissecting rabbits, calculating planetary orbits, reading Goethe, and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. "The reader is left," the codebreaker wrote, "with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman's life from the cradle to the grave." But to Hendersonville, North Carolina author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather. "Cipher" reanimates Jermey's ancestor, warts and all, as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone's great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with future N.C. governor and U.S. senator Zebulon Vance, and as he raises sons who will later die on Gettysburg's battlefield. Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones's expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, and emotional resonance, even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family and himself. SEE MORE FROM NORTH CAROLINA