6/26/2010:
We all have a built-in personal identification system: our fingerprints. Like two snowflakes, no two people's fingerprints are identical.
Evidence indicates that fingerprinting has been around for centuries, but Englishman William Hershel is credited as the first person to implement the practical application of fingerprinting in the 1850s.
The process developed over time, and on this date in 1939, the Linton Civic Club voted at a meeting to open a city fingerprinting project. The WPA was to administer the program, allowing residents to be fingerprinted. This would work as a failsafe, allowing better identification in such cases as inheritance and accidental death...and not, as the Emmons County Record hastened to add, "because you might be a criminal."
Dakota Datebook written by Sarah Walker
Sources:
Emmons County Record, June 29, 1939, p.1