April 20, 1932 – February 9. 2022
Albert Kaplan, discoverer of the daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln, is dead. He was 89 years old, the youngest child of Esther Chodosh and Sol Kaplan of Gouverneur, New York. He was active in the animal liberation movement.
In 1977 while browsing in a New York art gallery, he came upon the daguerreotype. He told friends, “As I held it in my hand, I wondered about this handsome, beautifully groomed, aristocratic young man. I thought that he was Abraham Lincoln.”
In Paris, France in late 1986, after attending a lecture by Dr. Claude N. Frechette of the American Hospital in Paris, Kaplan believed that Dr. Frechette might be the ideal man to examine the data he had assembled over years, with a view to determining, scientifically, whether or not the young man of the daguerreotype was Abraham Lincoln.
After his six-year study, Dr. Frechette’s authentication, “A New Lincoln Image,” was published in the 1994 Summer Edition of the “Journal of Forensic Identification,” the official publication of the International Association For Identification. A first of forensic medicine, Dr. Frechette’s analysis can be viewed at www.lincolnportrait.com.
Albert is survived by his wife, Vreni. He has been buried near the grave of his brother, Jacob, in Ogdensburg, New York.