Bertillon card

Obverse and reverse of a Bertillon card. (Courtesy of the Archival Collection of the Albany County Hall of Records, Albany, New York) n.burr-TIL-yən KARD a double-sided card used by police agencies and penal institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to record information on suspects and criminals and consisting of photographs of the individual from the front and the side, the person’s name, specific measurements, identifying marks, criminal history, and aliases, among other information

Notes

The French police officer Alphonse Bertillon invented the Bertillon card and system, and the mug shot, which is a feature of every Bertillon card. The Bertillon system (also known as bertillonage) was an early methodical means of identifying criminals biometrically and was, thus, the precursor to the use of fingerprints and DNA for this purpose. Each Bertillon card consisted, most importantly, of specific measurements, an accounting of the identifying marks, and two mug shots of the suspect or criminal. The specific placement of these data differed, with some Bertillon cards displaying photographs alone on the obverse, some displaying the photographs and measurements there, and later cards adding the person’s fingerprints in addition to the original data required by bertillonage. The cards themselves formed just one part of the system, which also consisted of complex filing practices to allow for retrieval of a card by the features of the person, rather than personal name or registration number. The pronunciation of “Bertillon” is an Anglicization, which sometimes leads to the misspelling of the word as “Bertillion.”