In the spring of 1893, a photograph was taken in a studio on the second floor of a stone building that no longer exists. The woman seated in the chair is young, perhaps twenty-two. She wears a dark bodice with a lace collar arranged carefully at her shoulders. Her hair is pinned in the fashion of the day. Her expression is calm, almost distant, as though she is not entirely certain what is happening around her.
In her arms she holds a bundle. A christening blanket with satin edges, folded the way mothers had folded such things for centuries. The bundle is the size of a newborn. Judging by the tension in her forearms, it weighs about what a newborn weighs. She looks down at it with the particular softness that human faces show only when a mother looks at her child.
But there is no child inside. There never was a child in that bundle.
When an archivist first examined this photograph, 130 years after it was taken, she sat in the conservation lab in the basement of a records office and said nothing for nearly eleven minutes. What she had noticed inside that carefully folded blanket was something that should not have been possible in a photograph from that year, in that city, from a studio whose ledger she was holding open in her other hand.
This is the story of that photograph, and of the 6,000 other photographs found stacked behind it in a room that was never supposed to be opened. It is the story of the women who sat for those images, and of a practice spread across so many cities that, once you begin to trace it, you realize it could not have been organized by any single institution we know of or whose name history has taught us.
The archivist is not named in this account. In the years that followed, she asked to be referred to only as "the Reader," because that was the role she played on the evening everything began. At the time, she worked as a contract indexer for a municipal historical society, and her assignment that day was ordinary. A commercial building near the old river district was scheduled for demolition. Before the walls came down, a small crew was tasked with removing anything of historical value from the upper floors. Records, official papers, framed notices, the kind of material that fills the back rooms of a city archive and gets quietly digitized over the following decade.
The building had been many things in its life: a tailor's showroom on the ground floor, a dental clinic above it, an accounting office on the third floor. But the second floor, the space that mattered, had once housed a photographer, and the studio had operated there under three successive names between 1887 and 1914.
When the Reader arrived that morning, the second floor had been almost entirely cleared. Only the back wall remained, along with a section of built-in cabinets that the demolition crew had classified as low priority, meaning they would likely be smashed on site rather than preserved. She opened the cabinet doors expecting to find nothing.
What she found instead was a stacked collection of cabinet cards inside paper folders, arranged in loose chronological order, filling the cavity from floor to ceiling. The top of the pile was covered in plaster dust from a leak that had come through the ceiling sometime in the past several decades. But beneath that top layer, the photographs were in excellent condition. They had been sealed away from light for what she initially estimated was more than a century.
She did what any trained archivist would do. She stopped the demolition. She called her supervisor. Then, while waiting for the proper conservation team to arrive, she began carefully examining the stacks with cotton gloves, because that is what training tells you to do when you find something you do not yet understand.
There were more than 6,000 photographs in the cabinet. They were all, without exception, photographs of women. And a very large number of them, though not all, were photographs of women holding what appeared to be newborn infants.
To understand what she was looking at, you have to understand what a photography studio was in that era. It was not a place a person dropped into casually. Having a photograph taken in the 1890s was expensive, formal, and almost exclusively reserved for important occasions. Weddings, confirmations, first wedding anniversaries, the return of a soldier from a campaign, the departure of a son for a distant city. And most reliably of all, the birth of a child.
The christening portrait was one of the most common commercial products any studio offered in that era. Every professional photographer kept a set of props for the purpose. A wooden cradle, a painted cloth backdrop, and a christening blanket embroidered with the studio's mark, which appears in thousands of surviving images across the continent.
The studio that once operated on the second floor of that building was, by everything the Reader could find, a modestly successful commercial operation. Its last owner died in 1915. The business closed shortly afterward. The remaining fixtures appear to have been sealed inside the cabinets when the space was renovated for the next tenant, and remained untouched for 108 years.
But the volume of what she found in that cabinet did not match the volume of the business. Six thousand photographs taken over roughly 27 years of operation meant the studio produced an average of more than 200 christening or maternity portraits every year. In a city of that size, in that period, no commercial business in that line of photography had that many maternity portraits. The numbers simply do not appear anywhere in the surviving trade records.
Comparable studios working with the same clients in the same neighborhoods produced perhaps 40 to 60 such portraits a year at their peak. This studio, based on the material sealed behind its walls, was quietly producing four to five times that volume, without appearing in any advertisement, and without any surviving mention in the trade periodicals of the time.
And every photograph, when the Reader began looking at them one by one, contained the same anomaly.
At first glance, the images look ordinary. A woman in the dress of the era sits in the studio chair and holds an infant in a christening blanket. The lighting is soft, coming from a north-facing skylight. The backdrop is the same painted drape in nearly every image. The composition is nearly identical from one photograph to the next, which is not unusual, because studios of that era used standardized poses to speed sitters through a busy midday workflow.
The women differ in age, in dress, and in apparent social class. Some are clearly wealthy, wearing silk and pearls. Some wear the plain wool of servants on a rare day off. Some are older than one would expect for a new mother. Some are younger than the law of that era would have allowed them to marry. But they all look down at their infants with the same expression. And they all hold those infants the same way.
That was when the Reader began to notice the second thing.
The second thing is what made her stop searching, close the folder, and sit at the conservation table with her hands in her lap for the eleven minutes described at the beginning of this account. Those bundles were not children. They had never been children.
What each of these women was holding with the tender gaze of a new mother was a weighted form wrapped in a christening blanket. In some photographs, the form is convincing enough that you would have to look twice to notice. The head is proportioned correctly. There is what appears to be a face inside the folds of the blanket, arranged to catch the light in a particular way. In other images, the shaping is less skilled. And in a smaller number, the overall outline is almost crude, as though the studio's stock of prepared bundles had run out that day and a substitute had been assembled in a hurry.
But the bundles were not what made her sit down. It was the fact that every one of these women, in every one of those photographs, from every year the studio operated, was wearing the same piece of jewelry: a small oval pendant on a dark cord, hanging at the base of the throat.
The pendant appears in the portraits of the wealthy and in the portraits of servants. It appears on young women and on elderly women. It appears in the oldest dated photograph, from 1887, and in the last dated photograph, from late 1914. Six thousand women, 27 years, and the same pendant every time.
That pendant is what turned the matter from a curiosity into an investigation.
The Reader spent the next six weeks doing what any experienced archivist does when facing something that fits no category she was trained for. She began to index. She began to measure. She photographed each of the 6,000 cabinet cards under controlled lighting, front and back. And she began the painstaking work of transcribing the notations that appeared on the reverse of many of them.
Because on the back of a substantial portion of those photographs, in a small, neat hand that was not the studio photographer's, someone had written a single line of information. A date, a first name, a home address, and in every case, a number.
The numbers did not follow any obvious sequence. They were not the studio's own inventory numbers, which appeared elsewhere on the card in different ink and a different hand. These were four-digit numbers written in a distinctive brown ink that iron-gall analysis later confirmed was made from a formula common to institutional record-keeping in that region during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The kind of ink used by hospitals, parish registers, and registrars in certain municipal offices whose functions were later folded into agencies that no longer exist.
She began making reference comparisons. The addresses on the backs of the photographs matched real addresses in the city, most of them in three specific neighborhoods on the east side of the river. The first names, when checked against surviving census pages for the relevant years, matched real women who had lived at those addresses in those years.
But when she tried to trace those same women forward in the records, to the next census, to the marriage register, to the death index, she found something she was not prepared for. In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the woman simply disappeared from the record after the year her photograph was taken. There was no death record, no marriage under a changed name, no emigration document, nothing at all.
She was not the first person to notice this pattern. She learned that later, when she began cautiously reaching out to other archivists in similar positions in other cities. She did not use her professional email account for these inquiries. She wrote on personal letterhead sent through ordinary mail, and framed each letter as a general question about unusual studio portrait collections from the same period.
She expected polite refusals, or perhaps one or two replies indicating an isolated curiosity. What she received instead, over the first month of correspondence, was more than a dozen replies. Two of them, both from women in their fifties who had spent their careers in the quiet basement rooms of municipal records offices, arrived within days of each other. They had made similar discoveries.
One, in a coastal city 300 miles to the north, had found a cache of 2,300 portraits behind a false wall in what had once been a maternity wing. The other, in an inland industrial town, had found a smaller cache, only about 700 cards, sealed inside the base of an iron radiator in a building that had housed an orphanage.
Two more replies came from archivists working in coastal cities on opposite coasts, both reporting smaller finds, both describing the same distinctive pendant appearing on the necks of the women in the photographs. The portraits from those other caches had been produced in different studios and in different years, using different backdrops. The women in them were different women. But the pendant was the same. The bundles were the same. And the notations on the backs of the cards, where they were found, were written in the same brown iron-gall ink, which forensic document examiners later confirmed was almost certainly the same hand across all three collections.
One writer, or a very small group of writers, working to the same system across at least three cities and at least 27 years. Marking the backs of studio portraits that appeared on their face to be nothing more than ordinary christening photographs.
The forensic assessment, when it was finally conducted on a small sample of cards that had been transferred years later, concluded that the ink composition was consistent enough across the three collections to suggest a single source, meaning the ink itself had been mixed in one place and distributed. The letterforms, particularly the joins between certain consonants and the terminal flourishes on the numerals, matched too closely to be the product of coincidence or shared training. Whoever wrote those inscriptions had been trained by the same instructor, or was the same person moving between cities over what amounted to a full career.
The Reader assembled her material into a preliminary report. She submitted that report through her institution's official channels the following summer. Within eleven weeks, her contract with the historical society was quietly not renewed, on the stated grounds of budget reduction, even though no other contract indexer in her department was let go that fiscal cycle.
A former supervisor told her informally, when he caught her alone at a professional conference a year later, that some of the material she had indexed had been reclassified as institutionally sensitive, and that the collection had been moved to a special preservation trust that his board had not publicly listed. He did not tell her the name of the trust. He gave her no documents about the transfer. He told her only that the collection was safe, that it had been properly housed, and that any further inquiries on her part would be interpreted as a breach of professional protocol.
She stopped asking. She never saw the 6,000 cabinet cards again. But she had already made her copies. She had already sent her reference tables to the other archivists in encrypted files stored on personal drives she kept outside her office. And she had already, without fully realizing why, made a personal transcription of every notation on the backs of the photographs she had copied, in a notebook she kept at home, in a locked drawer she opened only on days when she was ready to face what she had seen.
That notebook is why we know what we now know. Everything in this account comes from what she wrote in it, from what her two colleagues added in the years that followed, from the forensic ink analysis eventually conducted on a small sample of cards that were never handed over, and from a handful of outside witnesses whose testimony she was able to collect before she stopped speaking about the matter publicly altogether, in the winter of what would have been her sixty-first year.
The notebook now exists in three copies. One is held by a legal executor in a personal capacity, and his identity remains protected by professional confidentiality. Another is held by a research cooperative that meets twice a year in a rented conference room in a city I will not name. The third copy is the one the Reader kept for herself, in that same locked drawer, in the same apartment where she still lives.
It took the Reader nearly eleven months of quiet, meticulous work in the evenings and on her days off before the shape of what she was looking at became clear. The pattern that emerged once the three collections were indexed and compared against each other was not the pattern anyone expected to find.
The three archivists began their work assuming they were looking at a form of commercial fraud, perhaps a photographic trick of the era, in which women were sold portraits of themselves with borrowed infants to send to distant relatives or absent husbands, in an age when a woman who did not bear a child after a certain age faced considerable social pressure. That explanation is not unreasonable on its face. There is documented evidence of similar practices in that period within certain communities, though never at the scale the three collections suggested.
But the pattern did not fit that explanation. Because the women were not the same age, were not of the same class, and were not, judging by the addresses on the backs of the cards, from the kind of population that would share any single motive for buying a fake portrait. Some of them, as the addresses indicated, lived in large houses in wealthy neighborhoods, in homes where a portrait with a false child would have served no conceivable purpose. Others lived in tenement housing, where the cost of a photograph represented a significant portion of the family's weekly income, and where such a fraud would have had no clear benefit.
The pattern that did fit, once the three archivists spent enough time with the data to see it, was something else entirely. When they plotted the addresses of the women in their photographs onto maps of their cities, and when they laid the dates of those photographs onto timelines for those addresses, something began to emerge. In the six months preceding every photograph, in the household associated with that address, a real birth had occurred, in every case without exception.
In every case where the researcher could locate a matching hospital record, a parish baptismal entry, or a midwife's ledger, each of these women, at the time her photograph was taken with a wrapped weight in her arms, had given birth to a living child six months earlier. And in every one of those cases, the child was no longer in the household by the time the photograph was taken. Not in the records, not at the address, not in any subsequent document the archivists could find. The child had simply vanished, as though it had never existed, except for a single line in a birth register that had placed it in the world at the beginning of the timeline the researchers were tracing.
This is the part where you have to slow down, because ordinary explanations do not work here either. Infant mortality in that period was genuinely shocking, especially in crowded urban areas, and the loss of a child in its first six months was a tragedy so common that no family in any social class was spared it. If the pattern pointed to memorial portraits taken by grieving mothers in the aftermath of a child's death, that would be a painful and difficult subject, but it would not be strange. There is an entire category of post-mortem photography from that era, well documented in the historical literature, and surviving examples of that genre are unmistakable. The children are clearly visible in them. The photographs are labeled as memorial images. The circumstances are recorded plainly in family papers.
These photographs were not of that kind. In these images, the woman does not look bereaved. She looks down at what she is holding with an expression any observer would read as ordinary maternal attention, not grief. There is no black armband, no mourning dress, no handkerchief, no swollen eyes. None of the visual conventions that memorial photography in that era used without exception to signal the nature of the subject to the viewer.
These women, if you did not know what you were looking at, would appear in every respect to be new mothers holding their infants with pride in the standard portrait pose of the time. That is the point. That is what the composition was designed to achieve. To produce an image of a mother with her child that, from every visible angle, would show anyone who later encountered it in a family album or an inherited box of photographs exactly that and nothing else.
The bundle is not a wrapped body. It is, as stated earlier, a shaped weight. And the notation on the back of the photograph is not a memorial inscription. It is a four-digit number, a first name, and an address. That is all.
When the Reader tried to find death records for the infants born in the six months before each photograph, she found something that made her second colleague, the one in the coastal city, take a personal leave of absence from her job for three weeks. The infants had no death records. In the small sample she was able to complete before her contract ended, of 97 cases she matched fully, only nine had corresponding death certificates in the municipal register files. The other 88 infants had simply disappeared from the records. No death certificate, no continuation in baptismal registers, no school enrollment three or four years later, no appearance in any subsequent census, nothing.
They had been born. Their births were recorded. And then, at about six months, they vanished, and their mothers were sitting in a studio holding a shaped weight wrapped in a blanket, wearing the same small pendant that appeared on every other woman in every other collection in all three cities.
And after the photograph, in two-thirds of the cases, the mothers themselves also disappeared from the record, exactly as described earlier. The children first, then a few months later, the mothers. That is the pattern. That is the sequence that repeats in the same order across 6,000 cases in the studio the Reader entered, across 2,300 cases in the maternity wing on the coast, and across 700 cases in the foundling home inland.
Nine thousand mothers in three cities over 27 years, all following the same sequence, all sitting for the same photograph, all wearing the same pendant, all leaving behind the same silence in the records.
That is what the Reader wrote in her notebook, and that is the pattern the other two archivists independently confirmed when they ran the same cross-references against their own collections. The disappearance of the children preceded the disappearance of the mothers by intervals ranging from two months, in the shortest case, to three years and four months in the longest documented case. But the sequence was consistent. The child goes first, the mother goes second. The photograph is taken in the interval between. And in the photograph, the mother holds a substitute, a form, a weight, something resembling what she no longer holds at home.
That is what those 6,000 photographs represent. That is what the archivist saw when she finally allowed herself to see it.
The archivists were not the only sources that remained. As word of their work spread within a very small circle of researchers, correspondence began arriving from other quarters. Not from official institutions, but from ordinary individuals, most of them elderly. Most wrote in the careful cursive of a generation that had learned penmanship as a formal school subject. These were descendants of the women in the photographs, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And in a few cases, they were the children of surviving siblings who had lived long enough to remember what older generations had refused to discuss.
Their letters together form the second layer of the record. They add to the pattern in ways that purely archival research could not have reached on its own.
The first letter of significance came from a woman in her eighty-second year, writing from a small town on the eastern edge of the plains. She had inherited from her mother a single portrait, which she described in her letter as having always frightened her without her knowing why. When she photographed it and attached the copy, the image matched the collection precisely. The pendant, the bundle, and the downward gaze. The woman in the photograph was her maternal grandmother, who had died, or was said to have died, in the winter of 1902, when her mother was three years old. An aunt had raised her mother afterward.
Her mother had never spoken of the grandmother, except once, in her final illness, when she said she believed the woman in the photograph was not her mother at all. That her mother had been someone else. And that the photograph had been placed in the family album by an institution after her real mother was taken. The letter writer had not known how to interpret that remark in the sixty years since her mother said it to her. She still did not know. But she wrote, as she put it, because she had recently read a small notice in a regional heritage preservation newsletter about the indexing of unusual studio portraits from that period, and wondered whether her own photograph might be of interest.
It was of interest. The Reader replied with a letter. The two women corresponded for the remainder of the letter writer's life, which lasted another eleven months.
A second letter came from a man in his seventies, a retired railway engineer, whose grandmother had been committed to what he described only as a rest home for the mentally afflicted in the spring of 1908. He had been told she died there of pneumonia the following winter. The family never received a body. They were told the rest home had arranged a proper burial on the institution's grounds, and that visits to the grave were not permitted, on grounds of infection control. His grandfather had accepted this at the time. He had even remarried within a year, to a widow his own age from the same congregation, and raised his later family in circumstances the letter writer described as ordinary.
The photograph of the first wife, the grandmother, was kept in a drawer that the letter writer first opened at age nineteen, after his grandfather's death. The photograph was a cabinet card. The woman was holding a bundle. She was wearing a pendant on a dark cord.
A third letter came from a woman writing on behalf of her mother, who was no longer able to write for herself at that point. The mother's own mother had disappeared from the family home in the summer of 1899, when the mother was five years old. The mother had never been told what happened. She had been raised by a housekeeper for several years, then sent to relatives in a distant state. The father, who was present and comfortable throughout, never spoke his first wife's name in the child's hearing after the disappearance. Only once, in his old age, when the mother returned to visit him during his final illness, did he gesture toward her in a moment of confusion, as though she had gone to a place he called the sisters' house. He said nothing else. And when the mother asked him what he meant, he refused to explain. He died two weeks later.
The mother spent the rest of her long life trying, without success, to learn what the sisters' house was and where it was located. She never found out, but she had a photograph, a cabinet card, of a woman holding a bundle, wearing a pendant on a dark cord.
A fourth letter, and this one will be summarized because its contents are painful to read aloud, came from a woman whose great-grandmother had left her not only a photograph but also a diary. The diary covered the six months preceding the photograph. It stopped mid-sentence three days before the photograph was taken. The final entries describe the writer's growing awareness that her infant, born the previous autumn, was no longer being brought to her at the scheduled feeding times. She wrote that the nurse attending her had begun giving evasive answers to her questions. And the doctor, when consulted, had told her she was suffering from a nervous disorder common among women of her age, and that she should calm herself and rest and not trouble herself.
The last sentence in the diary is written in the woman's own hand, and it is quoted here exactly as it appears in the Reader's transcription. "I have begun to believe," the diarist wrote, "that they will not give her back to me." The sentence ends there. There is no period. The diary continues for two more pages, but those two pages are blank.
There are, in total, 47 such letters in the notebook. Forty-seven descendants from 23 states describing the same absence in their family timelines. A woman who disappeared, a photograph that survived, and an institution mentioned only obliquely, if at all, in the surviving testimony. And in nearly every case, a father or husband who never spoke of what happened, and took whatever he knew to his grave without ever writing it down.
The silence of those men, if treated as evidence in itself, tells you something. Whatever happened to their wives had been arranged in such a way that accepting the loss was easier than asking about it. And whatever institution made that arrangement, the men understood at some level, in a way they never wished to describe, that inquiry would not be tolerated.
The question that arose once the archivists had gathered enough descendant correspondence to understand the human dimension of what they were looking at was a question about the studios themselves. Because the studios were, by any ordinary reading of the profession, ordinary. They operated under their owners' names. They paid business taxes. They appeared at least occasionally in public classified advertisements in local newspapers. The studio owner in the first city was listed in his trade association's professional directory for the last nineteen years of his career. He voted in municipal elections. He had a wife and three children. According to two notices published at his death in 1915, he was well regarded by his colleagues and had specialized in what was described as the finest class of family portraiture.
There is a photograph of him taken by one of his employees on the studio's twentieth anniversary. He stands at the entrance to the second-floor space, hands clasped in front of him. He looks into the camera with the calm, settled expression of a man who has spent his professional life looking through a lens at other people's faces. There is nothing in the photograph, or in any surviving document about him, to suggest he was engaged in anything but the ordinary work of a commercial photographer of his time.
But the volume of the maternity portraits, the presence of the pendant, and the notations on the backs in a hand that was not his, all point in the same direction. Whatever the front room of the studio appeared to be, its back rooms were doing something else.
The photographic plates for the maternity portraits, which the Reader was able to identify separately in the collection because they carried a distinctive emulsion signature under microscopic examination, were not developed at the studio's regular premises. They were developed elsewhere and returned to the studio as finished cards only, waiting for the pendant to be added by someone who came from outside and sat at a desk the studio kept in a closed room away from the main gallery.
The Reader was able to establish this because the studio's account books, preserved by the owner's nephew in a separate archive, which she was eventually able to consult under a special research agreement, showed no expenditure at all for the developing chemicals, glass plates, or paper that would have been required to produce the volume of maternity portraits found in the cabinet. The materials had come from somewhere else. The developing had been done somewhere else. And someone, on a schedule that appeared as a regular monthly entry in the account book classified simply as commission work, was paying the studio a fixed sum to accept finished cards and store them in the second-floor cabinet.
The commission payments over the 27 years of the studio's operation amounted to a figure that represented significant additional income for the owner, though not a great fortune. Perhaps enough to explain why he accepted the arrangement without asking too many questions about who exactly came each month with a closed case full of finished cards. Enough to explain why he had the cabinet installed in the first place. And why he took care, according to a handwritten note in the margin of one of the account ledgers, to reinforce the space behind it and isolate it from light according to specifications provided by the party to the shipping agreement.
That marginal note, dated 1889, is one of only two references to the arrangement in his hand anywhere in the surviving papers. The other appears in a letter to his brother sent in 1894, in which he mentions in passing that the monthly obligation was less troublesome than he had feared, and that the party in question was, as he put it, entirely correct in every detail of his dealings with him. He did not say what he had feared. He did not say who the party was. He did not say what the obligation involved. His brother evidently already knew.
Who was that party? The account books do not name them. The signature on the receipts, which appears in the same brown iron-gall ink used in the notations on the backs of the cards, is not a personal signature. It is a monogram. Three interlocking letters, in a form the Reader could not trace to any registered business, professional association, or fraternal or religious organization operating in that region during those decades.
The monogram appears on receipts issued to all three of the studios the archivists had identified by that point. The payment amounts, the terms of the arrangements, and the monthly delivery schedules were substantially identical across the three studios. The same party, or parties using the same procedures, the same ink, the same monogram, and the same timeline in three different cities across the same period, contracting with three different commercial photographers to accept and store portraits of women the photographers themselves had not taken.
The party who actually took those photographs, using equipment set up somewhere the archivists could not locate, remains unidentified. The technical characteristics of the exposures, once a specialist in nineteenth-century photographic processes was quietly consulted, indicated that the images had been produced with institutional-grade equipment rather than commercial equipment. The lens quality was consistent with a research laboratory or a large hospital, not a portrait studio. The lighting, when analyzed on the surviving prints, indicated a fixed installation of gas lamps arranged in a specific configuration for uniform reproduction, rather than the adjustable natural light a commercial studio would have used. Whoever took those photographs did so in a room designed for the purpose. A room that existed, a room that was used month after month for 27 years, and that has never been identified in any building still standing in any of the three cities.
The pendant at the throat of every woman in every one of those photographs is the closest thing to a signature the collection ever left behind. And that pendant, as the next section will show, was not decorative. It was an identifier. It marked the women in the photographs as belonging to a specific list, kept in a specific place for a specific institutional purpose that the surviving records barely allow us to reconstruct.
What we know, we know because the four-digit numbers on the backs of the cards eventually turned out to correspond to something. And that correspondence, once the researcher found it in the eighteenth month of her indexing work, is the single most important discovery in this entire story.
The four-digit numbers on the backs of the cards were the key. For eighteen months, the researcher assumed they were internal file numbers used by whoever produced the photographs. She tried matching them against every internal numbering system she could think of. Studio inventory numbers, hospital admission numbers, parish register numbers, municipal census numbers, and poor relief numbers. She tried them against the sequential order of each photograph within the cabinet, the sequential order of each date, and the sequential order of each address on each street. None of the tests produced any meaningful relationship. The numbers, whatever they meant, were not organized according to any of the ordinary systems.
The connection appeared, when she finally found it, by accident. She was looking one evening at a document unrelated to the matter, a published directory printed in 1896 for the inmates registered at what were then called state institutions for the feeble-minded and epileptic, a class of asylum that proliferated across the country in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. She had pulled the directory because a letter from one of the descendants mentioned that a great-grandmother had been committed to one of those facilities in the years before her disappearance, and the researcher wanted to check whether the name appeared in the published lists.
The letter writer had asked her in a later note to look for the grandmother's name specifically, because the family had never received official confirmation of the committal and had spent 120 years wondering whether the story they had been told was even true. The name did not appear. But something else did.
On page three of the directory, in the columns of numbers that accompanied each entry, she saw a series of four-digit numbers. The format matched the format of the numbers on the backs of her photographs. She took out her notebook. She matched the first six numbers she had transcribed against the directory. Four of the six numbers appeared in the directory, attached to the names of women admitted to that specific institution in that specific year. And who were, according to the directory's summary column, still resident at the institution at the time of publication.
Those four women matched four of the addresses on the backs of the photographs, which meant the numbers on the backs of the photographs were not internal file numbers at all. They were admission numbers. The women in the photographs, at the time the photographs were taken, had already been admitted to institutions of that kind. And someone working from outside those institutions was photographing them, or arranging for them to be photographed, holding false bundles as substitutes for the children they had lost or been separated from in the months before their admission.
The Reader spent the next four months systematically tracing this connection. She was eventually able to match more than 900 of the numbers on the backs of the cards to admission records at what turned out to be a network of at least 14 institutions distributed across the eastern half of the country, administratively linked to a shared oversight board whose meeting minutes were transferred at some point in the 1920s from the municipal archive to a private repository under the terms of a trust settlement whose beneficiaries were never publicly disclosed.
The institutions were, on their face, exactly what they claimed to be. State-licensed facilities for the care of women whom the medical authorities of the time considered unfit for independent life. The categories of admission were remarkably broad and loose by modern standards. A woman could be committed on the certificate of a single physician if she was described as suffering from any of a long list of conditions that included melancholia, hysteria, moral insanity, puerperal disorders, chronic nervous exhaustion, and a category simply called feeble-mindedness that had no clinical definition beyond the certifying doctor's opinion.
Once admitted, a woman could be detained for the rest of her life without further review, and could be barred under the regulations in force at most of these facilities from receiving visits from her family for indefinite periods, on the grounds of therapeutic isolation.
The admission records the Reader was able to consult for the portion of the institutions whose records had not been destroyed or moved out of reach showed a striking consistency in the pattern of admission. The women admitted to those institutions had, in the overwhelming majority of cases, been admitted within twelve months of giving birth. The certifying physician in a very large proportion of cases was the same physician who had attended the birth. The certified condition in a very high proportion of cases was puerperal insanity, the catch-all term of the era for any mental condition following childbirth, which required no laboratory confirmation and no second medical opinion.
The children of those women were handled inconsistently in the surviving records. A small number were returned to fathers or to relatives on either side. A larger number were transferred to what the records call receiving homes, institutions for infants awaiting placement, whose subsequent records are among the most scattered in the archival landscape of that period. The largest number, in the cases the Reader could trace with any completeness, appear to have entered the receiving homes and then simply disappeared from the records in the same pattern by which their mothers disappeared from the records after their photographs were taken. There are no formal transfer papers. There is no death record. There is no indication of a later residence at any successor institution. The receiving home is the last recorded location, and the record ends there.
In a few cases, the Reader was able to reconstruct, with the help of surviving descendants, private inquiries made by fathers who eventually tried to recover their children, and who were answered with the standard institutional formulation of the era, that the child had been placed with a suitable family in another state, and that further inquiry would be improper in the interest of the child's new circumstances. No family was ever named. No state was ever specified. The father was told in every documented case that the matter was closed and that reopening it would serve no purpose.
The institutions themselves, when approached directly by researchers in later decades, gave the standard institutional answer to inquiries about historical records. The records were transferred. The records were destroyed in a flood. The records were consolidated with those of a successor agency whose records can no longer be located. The pattern of these answers, collected across the 14 institutions the Reader was able to identify, is itself part of the evidence. Different institutions, different states, different administrative lineages, but the same six or seven excuses offered in the same institutional language and the same regretful tone decade after decade whenever the specific question about the missing admission records was raised.
What happened to the mothers in the months and years after their photographs were taken is the part of the account where the surviving documentation is thinnest. Not because there is no evidence, but because the evidence that exists belongs to a category of records that was never meant to survive, and has endured only as fragments in boxes of institutional papers that escaped destruction because someone quietly moved them somewhere the usual disposal orders did not reach.
The first thing to understand is that the portraits were, in every documented case, taken after the mother had already been admitted to one of the institutions. That is what the match with the admission numbers establishes. The woman sitting in the chair at the moment the shutter opened was already an inmate. Not a free woman visiting a studio in the city. She was, in every case, a woman who had been brought to the room where the photograph was taken under circumstances her surviving descendants did not fully understand and the institutions themselves never explained.
The transfer, according to the few surviving internal institutional documents, was organized as what the records call a monthly outing, and was described in the standing regulations of the institutions as photographic recreation permitted to inmates of appropriate behavior as a therapeutic activity that helped preserve normal feminine feelings. That was the official language. The phrase appears verbatim in the regulations of nine of the 14 institutions the Reader was able to survey, which strongly suggests it was drafted centrally and distributed to the facilities as a standard item.
What that meant in practice, based on the descendant testimony and the physical evidence of the photographs themselves, is that the institution transported a specific list of inmates once a month in a closed carriage to the room where the photographs were taken. The women wore for the occasion the clothes they had been wearing at the time of their admission, which the institution kept in labeled trunks. They were given the pendants to wear on the day of the photograph, and the pendants were removed immediately afterward. They were placed in the chair with the prepared bundle. The photograph was taken. They were returned to the carriage. They were returned to the institution. The pendant was placed in a locked cabinet in the resident superintendent's office. None of them ever wore it again.
The purpose of these photographs, according to the best the Reader could determine from the fragmentary institutional records, was to be sent to fathers or husbands. With a form letter in the institution's approved template informing the recipient that the inmate was in satisfactory health and had participated in the therapeutic photograph dated on the enclosed image. The letter did not mention the child in the surviving templates the Reader was able to consult, and did not refer to the bundle. It did not, in fact, explain what the photograph was, beyond the single phrase "therapeutic photograph," which was left to the recipient to interpret as he wished.
The intended interpretation, based on what the descendants' letters describe, was that the woman was still receiving care in some way as a mother. That her normal maternal feelings, as the approved formulation put it, were being preserved and maintained. And that the child, wherever it was, was still present with her on at least some symbolic level. The father was expected to accept that and to treat it as a substitute for any more specific inquiry about the woman's actual condition, the real child's whereabouts, and the fate of the entire family that had been separated months or years earlier at the institution's gate.
The fathers mostly accepted it, as noted in the section on the descendants' letters. Not because they were deceived by it in most cases, but because the alternative to acceptance was pressing against the institutional wall, and the institutional wall did not move. The men who did press, in a small number of documented cases, met the standard bureaucratic response of the period. Their letters went unanswered. Their personal visits were turned away at the gate. Their lawyers, where they had them, were informed that the woman's diagnosis was a medical matter beyond the scope of ordinary legal review. In two cases the Reader was able to document fully, husbands who continued to press were subjected to informal inquiries about their own mental state, initiated by the institution through its connections to the local medical establishment. Both men in both cases stopped pressing shortly afterward.
What happened to the women themselves inside the institutions after their last monthly photograph was taken is where the surviving evidence remains most scattered. The death records of the institutions, where they survive, list the common causes of the era. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, heart failure, puerperal fever, which is strange because puerperal fever is a complication of childbirth, and none of these women gave birth inside the institution. The dates of death, when compared against the dates of the last photographs, show a striking correlation. In more than 80 percent of the cases the Reader was able to match, the woman's recorded date of death fell within 22 months of the date of her last photograph. Whatever the institutions were doing with them, they were certainly not keeping them alive on any broad scale.
The way they were recorded in burial, in the cases where a burial record was found, follows another pattern the researcher spent nearly a year compiling, and it deserves to be stated plainly. The women were buried on the grounds of the institutions themselves, not in family plots, not in the churchyards of their home parishes, and not in any municipal cemetery where the usual official burial procedures applied. The grounds of each of the 14 institutions the researcher was eventually able to survey through published historical accounts and preserved site plans contained a section referred to simply as the north field or the west field, set aside for the burial of inmates whose families did not claim their bodies.
Whether families were notified during the twelve months between the last photograph and the recorded death of the option to claim the body is a question the surviving records do not answer. What the descendants' testimony consistently indicates is that families received a single letter after the death occurred, informing them that the woman had died of her usual illness, and that she had been buried with dignity on the institution's grounds at the institution's own expense. That letter closed the matter. No reply to that letter was permitted. The letter was, in every documented case, the last communication the family received from the institution about the woman whose photograph now sits unnamed in a drawer.
The question that inevitably presents itself once the pattern is laid out this way is the question of scale. Three archivists in three cities had by then identified nearly 9,000 photographs. Fourteen institutions distributed across the eastern half of the country appeared to be involved in the network that produced those photographs. The oversight body that linked those institutions administratively left almost no records available to the public. And the party commissioned to take the photographs remained unidentified, except for a single three-letter monogram written in brown iron-gall ink.
So how large was this? How many women were involved? Over how many years and how many places did the same fixed template letter reach the same closed doors?
The researcher spent the final years of her career trying to put boundaries on that answer. Not to produce a full count, which she recognized was impossible given the surviving material, but to establish the minimum scale that could reasonably be inferred from what she had. Her method was to identify every facility, through published historical accounts of state institutions in that period, that appeared to share the administrative characteristics of the 14 institutions she had already documented. The characteristics she was looking for were specific: a charter dating to the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, an admission profile heavily weighted toward postpartum women, a medical staff that overlapped at the level of consultancy appointments and professional society memberships with the medical staff of at least three of the institutions she had already identified, and a historical record that included at some point in the twentieth century a documented transfer of institutional papers to private storage under the terms of a trust settlement.
The list she produced by applying those four criteria contained 41 additional institutions across 22 states, operating in total from roughly 1882 to roughly 1923, when most of them were closed or merged into successor agencies, or quietly reorganized under new charters that severed their direct connection to the earlier network. The timing of that reorganization, clustered in the years immediately following the First World War, deserves note in itself. Something in the postwar administrative environment appears to have made the earlier arrangements unsustainable, and the network responded by dissolving its more visible components, moving its records into private trust boxes, and continuing whatever remained of its work under organizational forms no researcher has since been able to reconstruct.
If those forty institutions operated with the same admission profile, and engaged in the same monthly outing practice at the same rate as the fourteen documented facilities, the total number of women involved would fall somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000. That is a range, not a precise count. The Reader noted in her notebook that the range was a maximum estimate, and that the true figure was probably lower because not every institution on her expanded list would have participated at the same full rate. But the minimum estimate she derived, based on the most conservative assumptions, was still in the range of 18,000 women.
Eighteen thousand, in the eastern half of one country, within 41 years. She did not extend the survey beyond that country because her language skills did not allow her to work through institutional records elsewhere. And because she had become convinced by then that the pattern she documented was not confined to the country where she found it. There are indications in the descendants' correspondence she received that the same template letter was arriving at addresses in at least three European countries during the same decades, in local languages, from institutions sharing architectural features with those she had identified. She did not pursue those threads. Others working in those other places appear to have done so, but the results of that work, if they exist, were not published in any medium she could locate before her retirement.
A passing mention in an appendix to a preservation journal article printed in the 1960s describes an unusual collection of portraits found in a former sanatorium in central Europe, referring to what the author called an identifying ornament worn by everyone in the photographs. The article provides no further description of the ornament. The author of the article died the year after it was published. No subsequent study of the matter has appeared.
What she was able to establish about the broader pattern was this. The network was administrative in nature, not medical. The medical certificates that placed women in those institutions were, in the overwhelming majority of documented cases, issued by physicians trained at a small number of specific medical schools, who belonged to a limited number of professional societies, and who received their appointments on the recommendations of other physicians who had themselves received their appointments the same way. The pattern of appointments, when the Reader plotted it against the geographic distribution of the institutions, took the shape of a professional guild rather than a public health system. It was a system that reproduced itself. It was self-selecting. And it was, until the Reader herself began looking at it from the outside, essentially invisible to any observer who was not already part of it.
The party commissioned to take the photographs, the party whose monogram appeared on the receipts, appears to have been positioned somewhere inside that guild. Not at its center, because the medical decisions were not made by the photographic party, but adjacent to it and connected to it, sharing personnel at least at the level of the clerks whose handwriting linked the ink on the backs of the photographs to the ink in the institutional records. In other words, the photographs were a service the guild provided to itself, a quiet parallel practice operating alongside the core work of the institutions whose function I will attempt to describe in the next section.
The three-letter monogram, when the Reader finally traced its stylistic traditions back to a specific engraving school that trained a small number of institutional seal-makers during the 1870s, turned out to correspond to a symbol used by a class of inner associations operating within the medical professions in that period. Associations whose membership lists were never published, associations whose meeting minutes, where they survive, exist only in the private papers of some of their former members. Associations whose stated purpose, in the few surviving periodicals, was the advancement of a particular school of thought within the profession, on matters the periodicals discussed in terms so general that a contemporary reader cannot easily determine what they were actually advocating.
But the pattern of their memberships, the pattern of their institutional affiliations, and the pattern of the certificates that flowed from the pens of their members all point to a coordinated program of some kind. The three-letter monogram is, if the Reader's identification is correct, the visible fingerprint of that program.
The function of the photographs, once you have traced the pattern this far, becomes possible to name. Though naming it does not make it easy to hold in the mind.
The photographs were part of the cover. They were the mechanism by which the institution maintained the outward appearance of continuity between the woman who entered the institution and the woman whose name continued to appear on the family mantelpiece years later. The purpose of the fixed template letter and the therapeutic photograph attached to it was to close the loop between what the family was told and what the family was permitted to imagine. The woman was still there. The photograph proved it. The unseen child inside the bundle was still there. The photograph implied it. The letter said nothing about either that could be verified. The compositions of the photograph confirmed nothing that could be disproven. And the pendants that bound the whole scene together under a single visible mark told anyone who might examine the photograph in the future that this was a properly documented case, preserved under the appropriate number in the appropriate cabinet according to the appropriate procedure.
The system depended on the father's acceptance of the letters and the photographs on their face, and on the acceptance by descendants in later generations of the family narrative built around those documents. In an age when photography still carried a quasi-sacred evidentiary weight, and when the printed image was widely understood to be a direct mechanical transfer of reality, the therapeutic photograph was a near-perfect instrument of institutional deception. It did not lie about any specific fact. It simply composed the facts it presented in such a way that the viewer, unless already suspicious, filled in the missing facts himself from the ordinary stock of visual conventions that a family photograph of that era was expected to satisfy. The mother was there. She was calm. She was holding her child. The child was wrapped in a christening blanket in the customary style. The date on the card was recent. Everything was in order.
To break that illusion, you had to know two things that were not visible from the front of the card. You had to know that the bundle was not a child, and you had to know that the woman was already an inmate at the moment the photograph was taken. Neither of those facts was available to the ordinary recipient. The bundle was designed into the composition of the photograph precisely to defeat ordinary scrutiny. The woman's status was information the institution controlled absolutely, and disclosed to the family only in the approved form of the letter designed to accompany the photograph.
The institutional silence that surrounds this practice in the professional and popular historical literature of the twentieth century is not incidental. It is a direct extension of the same procedures that produced those photographs in the first place. The records were moved, the trust boxes were created, and successor bodies inherited the physical premises and the visible institutional history, but not the operational records that would have made the earlier practices reconstructable. The obituaries of the physicians who worked at those institutions were written by their colleagues, describing them in terms of professional distinction and public service that make no reference whatsoever to the specific admission patterns they signed off on. The published histories of the institutions themselves, where they were written, treat the admission profiles as ordinary features of medical practice in the period, without going into the specific network of appointments and referrals that linked the certifying physicians to one another.
The silence is not complete. There are, in the professional literature of the late twentieth century, a small number of published studies that touch the edges of the pattern the Reader was documenting. A dissertation submitted at a state university in the 1970s on the demographics of postpartum institutional admissions in a specific region during a specific decade. A study published by a small academic press in the 1980s on the administrative history of one of the 14 institutions the Reader identified. An article in a journal that appeared in a specialized preservation quarterly in the early 2000s about the unusual photographic holdings of a former state facility whose collection had been moved to a private institution shortly before its demolition.
Each of these publications, taken on its own, describes what appears to be an isolated curiosity. Taken together, in light of what the Reader assembled, they look like the exposed tips of a single submerged practice that no single publication was in a position to see whole.
In her final year of active work, the Reader attempted to bring the three publications and their authors together. Two of the three authors were still living. One agreed to a meeting. The meeting was set for a specific date and a specific place. The author did not attend. The author's family later reported that he had suffered a sudden health decline in the week before the meeting and was no longer able to travel. He recovered, according to later reports, within a few weeks of the meeting date, but he did not respond to any further attempts at contact and died of natural causes two years later. The other living author declined to meet from the outset, citing personal reasons she did not elaborate on. She stopped publishing shortly afterward.
The author of the article, the third of the three, had died before the researcher began trying to contact him, but she was able to consult his widow, who described her late husband's growing reticence in his final years about discussing the article with anyone. He had told her once that the article was an unsuitable subject for a young researcher, and that if he had realized at the outset what he was actually documenting, he would have chosen almost any other topic. According to the widow, he did not explain what he meant by that, and she did not press him to say more, out of respect for what she regarded as an old professional regret of his.
This pattern of discouragement, once the researcher recognized it as a pattern rather than a series of coincidences, was evidence in itself. Whatever the nature of that network, and whatever its successors may be, the mechanisms it once used to keep its practices out of the public record have not entirely faded. They have simply become quieter, slower, and more indirect, in the manner of all institutional practices that soften over time as the personnel who enforced them retire or die, replaced by successors who inherited the procedures without necessarily understanding the reasons behind them.
That may, in the end, be the most important thing to understand about the pattern the researcher documented. It no longer required, in its later decades, any conscious conspiracy. It required only that certain lines of inquiry, when pursued, be met with standard institutional responses of delay and evasion, and with quiet professional inconvenience for the researchers. Those responses were, and remain, sufficient.
What remains of that practice today in the physical record is not much. The 6,000 cabinet cards in the first collection are still, as far as anyone in the small research circle has been able to determine, in the possession of the private preservation trust to which they were transferred. The trust does not respond to inquiries. Its board is not publicly listed. Its registered address is a post office box in a small town in a state that does not require charitable trusts of that particular kind to disclose their holdings. Whether the cards are still intact, or have been digitized for internal use, or destroyed, or are simply sitting in acid-free boxes on climate-controlled shelves awaiting a purpose no one alive today remembers, is not information anyone outside can obtain.
The two smaller collections, the one found in the coastal maternity wing and the one found in the inland orphanage, took different paths after their initial discovery. The coastal collection was seized under a preservation order issued by the state heritage commission within four months of its discovery, and transferred to the national archive, where it remains under a restricted access classification that permits viewing only by researchers who submit a specific written proposal and receive approval from an advisory committee whose membership rotates every three years. No proposal submitted in the past decade has been approved. The committee has never issued a written explanation for its refusals. According to a state auditor's report issued several years ago, the committee's approval rate for any kind of proposal has been officially zero for the entire period the current classification has been in force.
The inland collection, by contrast, was quietly dispersed. Individual cards from that collection have appeared over the years in estate sales, in antique photography markets, and in occasional lots at regional auction houses. Their provenance cannot be traced through the auction records, because the dealers who first offered them for sale used generic descriptions and did not identify the original institutional source. The collectors who acquired them, in most cases, have no knowledge of the pattern they belong to. They believe they bought charming nineteenth-century family portraits, and they display them, or store them, or occasionally offer them for resale, with no awareness that the small pendant at the throat of the woman in the frame is anything more than an ordinary piece of jewelry from the period.
The collaborative research group, which meets twice a year in a rented conference room in a city that has not been disclosed, has spent the past decade trying to track as many of these dispersed cards as possible. Its members buy the cards when they appear at auction, at whatever price the market sets. They photograph them, index them, and add them to the shared database the group maintains on an encrypted drive. The database contained, at last count, detailed records for more than 1,100 cards from the inland collection alone. The collaborative group estimates that this represents perhaps 15 percent of the total originally dispersed, and that the rest, if they still exist, are sitting in unmarked drawers and forgotten albums in private homes across a very wide geographic area.
The three original archivists are, at the time of this account, still living, though only two of them remain actively involved in the research. The researcher whose work formed the basis of everything described here formally retired from all research activity in her sixty-first year, and has not spoken publicly about the collection since. Her notebooks remain in her possession. The three copies of them have been distributed as described earlier. She lives in the same city where she made her original discovery, in a small apartment a few miles from the site of the building that was demolished. The building is now a parking lot. There is no marker at the site. There is no plaque. There is no public acknowledgment of any kind that the second floor of the former building once housed a sealed cabinet behind reinforced walls, where 6,000 photographs of 6,000 women waited 108 years to be found.
The other two archivists continue the work of tracing what can be traced, more quietly. One of them, the researcher in the coastal city, has focused her recent years on the surviving institutional records of the 14 facilities originally identified, patiently filing information requests, pursuing state legislative avenues, and developing relationships with a small handful of retired employees who still remember the places before the transfers. Her results so far have been modest. A partial floor plan of one facility recovered from a state fire marshal's inspection file, a single page of admission data from another facility that was misfiled in the papers of a successor agency that has itself since been dissolved, and a photograph of the interior of a third facility showing in the background a small plaque bearing the same three-letter monogram found on the studio's shipment receipts. That photograph, taken by a state inspector in 1911 and preserved in a routine inspection report, is one of only two known independent images linking the monogram to a specific physical institution. The other appears on the interior of an inkwell recovered from a superintendent's office whose papers were sold at a state auction in the 1960s, and which the group acquired for its holdings at a later auction in the 1990s.
The third archivist, in the inland city, has largely withdrawn from active tracing work, and now serves as the curator of the group's database. She manages the encryption. She onboards new members, of whom only three have joined in the past decade, each vouched for by a current member. She maintains the index, adds new cards as they are acquired, and matches corresponding details across images to detect the slight variations that indicate which institution each card most likely came from. Her work is quiet, precise, and largely invisible. She has said, in the only interview she has given to an outside party, that she considers herself a librarian with no reading room, and that she expects the library to continue to exist in that form for as long as it takes until the general public is ready to know what is in it.
And so we return to the photograph we began with. The woman in the chair, the lace collar, the pinned hair, the bundle in her arms, and the pendant at her throat. She is one of 6,000. She is one of 9,000 if you count the two smaller collections. She is one of 18,000 according to the Reader's minimum estimate, and one of roughly 50,000 according to the maximum. She had a name that appeared on a census page. She had an address in a specific neighborhood of a specific city. Six months before the photograph was taken, she had given birth to a living child who no longer has any trace in the records. And at some point in the year following the photograph, she herself stopped appearing in the records, at a facility whose grounds held her remains under a marker that, if it ever existed, no longer stands.
The photograph you might see if you encountered a portrait of her today, hanging on a wall or kept in a drawer or offered at auction under a generic description, would tell you none of this. It would tell you only that she was a mother in the year the card was made, wearing the dress of the occasion, holding her child in the customary way. That was the purpose of the photograph. And that remains the purpose of the photograph 130 years later, in the drawers and albums where the surviving copies still rest. The design has held. The composition is still doing its work. And the pendant, unless you know what it is, still looks like an ordinary piece of jewelry from the period that no one would give a second thought.
If you have a cabinet card in your family papers dating from roughly 1882 to 1923, showing a woman holding a bundle in her arms, you are asked to look at it again. Look at what she is holding. Look at what she is wearing. Look at whether the face inside the blanket has that particular vagueness of a form rather than a child. And if you find, on looking, that the woman is wearing a small oval pendant on a dark cord at the base of her throat, then know that you are holding something that was designed to lie to you quietly across five or six generations about what became of a woman whose name you may or may not remember.
She was here. She was real. She had a child. And this photograph you are holding is the last thing the world was permitted to see of either of them.
That is the story of the photograph. That is what was in the bundle. And that is why, in the small circle of researchers who have followed this pattern across the past decades of their professional lives, this practice has a name they use only among themselves and only in private. They call it the quiet erasure. They have not yet given it any other name. They have not been able to.