My mom passed away in 2020, and in cleaning out her house I found her old diaries.  Seventy five years ago, in 1948 at the age of 15, she wrote: Some

Deciphering my Dead Mother’s Cipher | Martin C. Martin

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2023-01-27 17:30:10

My mom passed away in 2020, and in cleaning out her house I found her old diaries. Seventy five years ago, in 1948 at the age of 15, she wrote:

Some quick googling revealed it was a pigpen cipher. That’s where you take a 3×3 grid, like a Tic Tac Toe board, put a letter in each square, then use the square or “pen” that a letter is in to represent that letter. Of course, that only works for 9 letters. So you do it again, this time putting a dot in each square. That leaves 8 letters, so now you form an X, put a letter in each “pen” of the X, with or with out a dot.

And using that, I quickly decoded the first name, and got … JKLL LXNPNKON. Fail. She must be using a different way to map letters to pig pens. But what is it?

Well, in earlier entries she had crushes on hockey players and politicians. In fact, at age 14 she wrote “I like to imagine I am P.M. [Prime Minister] torn between 4 loves – 1. Cabinet Minister, 2. brother of first husband, 3. baseball big shot, + 4. French diplomat!” Two people in particular were Ontario Premier George Drew and Toronto Maple Leafs star Bill Ezinicki. And Bill fits the first cipher! Well, mostly. It has the right number of letters, the two Ls use the same symbol, and all three Is in Ezinicki use the same symbol. But the I in Bill uses a different symbol. Still it all fits too well to be a coincidence.

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