Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 October 1

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 1

historic fingerprints

I imagine that every major spy shop has made a habit, since before I was born, of trying to obtain the fingerprints of pretty much every public figure (over some threshold of significance). How far back does this go? If I somehow found some prints allegedly belonging to Abraham Lincoln, say, would there be any way to check it? This question was prompted by an episode of The Sandbaggers, involving a fingerprint of the Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office. —Tamfang (talk) 23:15, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Fingerprint and forensic science give some details. The use of fingerprints as a method of identification doesn't appear to have been widespread before the 20th century, so I doubt Lincoln's fingerprints are reliably recorded anywhere. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 23:24, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

*if* you were able to obtain copies of such fingerprints, you'd need to obtain them from multiple independent sources and compare them. Not just different sellers of copies made from the same original source - but from different sellers of copies made from DIFFERENT original sources. So if Vendor A has prints from (let's say) a book known to have been owned by Lincoln then that could easily be the prints of his wife - so you'd also need prints from Vendor A from something else - maybe something that resided in his office where his wife rarely visited. However, since the likelyhood that Vendor A is a disreputable fraud are pretty high - even if those two sets of prints match, they could both be faked. So you'd also want to get a set from Vendor B to compare against. But it would be no use to get copies of the same print taken from that same book because both Vendors might have been cheated by the same original source. So ideally, you'd want prints taken from different objects that would have been located in different places (in order to increase the chance that these are both objects that Lincoln would have held - but lower the chances that some other person might also have held them both) and supplied by different Vendors who could independently provide a trail of ownership back to Lincoln himself that include no overlapping sources.

If you get a match under those stringent circumstances - then I think the odds are good that it's genuine.

Of course if you have the *original* print on an actual physical object, then perhaps it's possible to get DNA from fingerprints - and that might be another possible route. Lincoln is suspected of suffering either from MEN2b or Marfan's syndrome - both relatively rare genetic disorders - if you could extract DNA from the print and demonstrate the existence of one or other of those conditions, I think you could be fairly confident that they're real...assuming there are no other 'red flags'.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:17, 2 October 2015 (UTC)