When Tristan Begg and his colleagues began assembling their study, they started with eight samples from institutional and private collections. Some had extensive documented histories. Others had gaps in their provenance chains. One of the central methodological challenges of the study was authentication: establishing, using genetic evidence rather than labels and family stories, which of the samples actually came from the same individual and which did not.
The Stumpff Lock has one of the most reliably documented histories of any Beethoven hair sample. Johann Andreas Stumpff was a German-born harp maker working in London who had developed a warm correspondence with Beethoven in the composer’s later years. After Beethoven died on March 26, 1827, Stumpff received a letter from Johann Baptist Streicher—the son of the pianist Nannette Streicher, who had been a close friend of Beethoven’s—along with a lock of hair cut from Beethoven’s head in the days immediately following his death. Stumpff’s reply, dated April 1827, acknowledged receiving the lock. This exchange was documented in letters that survived, creating a contemporaneous written record of the hair’s origin.
Stumpff later gave the lock to a thirteen-year-old Scottish orphan named Patrick Stirling, for reasons that remain unclear. From Stirling’s possession it eventually passed through several more hands and was ultimately acquired by Kevin Brown, an American collector and member of the Beethoven Society, who loaned it to the 2023 study. Brown’s sample, known as the Stumpff Lock, proved to be the best preserved of all the study’s materials and provided enough intact genetic material for the team to sequence Beethoven’s full genome to approximately 24-fold coverage—an extraordinary result for DNA extracted from hair that was nearly two hundred years old.