Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries

In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy.

In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, 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 offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and 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 author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.

Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author's ancestor 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 a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman's life. Along the way, 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, emotional resonance--even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself.

Try out Prestwood's cipher at cipherthebook.com!

Author: Jeremy B. Jones
Publisher: Blair
Published: 09/16/2025
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 8.98h x 5.91w x 1.18d
ISBN: 9781958888537


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/21/2025

About the Author
Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Cipher as well as Bearwallow, which was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and awarded gold in memoir in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His essays appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Appalachian Reckoning, and the Iowa Review. Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and now serves as an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University. He lives in Hendersonville, NC.