She is unidentified. The 2023 study determined that she was of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. The researcher Christian Reiter, quoted in Washington Post coverage of the study, noted that Ferdinand Hiller was of Jewish descent and that his mother may have been involved in preserving the lock—which could suggest that the hair came from someone in the Hiller family’s own social or familial circle rather than from Beethoven himself. But this is inference, not documentation. The woman has not been identified, and it may not be possible to identify her.
The circumstances under which a lock of an unknown woman’s hair came to be labeled and preserved as Beethoven’s are also unknown. The most benign explanation is a simple mix-up: Beethoven’s hair and someone else’s were both present in the same context in 1827, and the labels were switched or confused. Ferdinand Hiller may have received a lock from someone who was equally confused about its source. There is no basis in the available evidence for any claim of deliberate substitution, and the researchers did not suggest one.
What the Hiller Lock episode illustrates, with particular force, is the challenge of provenance in historical relics. The relic trade—the collecting and preserving of objects associated with famous people—has always operated on a mixture of documented fact and asserted tradition. Labels, family stories, and institutional histories can seem authoritative while resting on a single uncertain claim made decades or generations earlier. The Hiller Lock was trusted for more than a century because the provenance story was plausible and because the people who cared for it had no reason to doubt it.