More than a decade ago, in February 2015, The Emperor Norton Trust issued its first research on Emperor Norton's birth date. In a talk that we published online the same month, I argued for a birth date of 4 February 1818.

In that talk, I laid at the feet of Robert Ernest Cowan much of the blame for the incorrect "1819" birth date that was inscribed on the Emperor's headstone at Woodlawn Memorial Park in 1934.  

In 1923, Cowan had published an essay on Emperor Norton in the new California Historical Society (CHS) Quarterly — of which he was the inaugural editor — an essay in which he faked an 1819 birth date for the Emperor by falsifying an 1865 item in the Daily Alta newspaper.

But, in 1934, Cowan continued to hold sway over the CHS-aligned Emperor Norton Memorial Association that had established itself, in part, to secure a new headstone for the Emperor.

Cowan was the only person in the Association's circle who had weighed in on the Emperor's birth date — so they just went with Cowan’s birth date from 1923.

Or so we thought.

Comes new evidence — which we publish here on the 91st anniversary of the dedication of Emperor Norton's 1934 headstone — that...

Cowan revived and even ramped up his decade-old birth date fakery in early 1934, and did so while he was president of the board of the California Historical Society — a board that included 2 of the 4 officers of the new Emperor Norton Memorial Association — one of whom was the Association’s president.

It seems that — more than we knew: In 1934, the fix was in for a falsified 1819 birth date on the Emperor's headstone.