The word “heirloom” was first used in 15^th-century English legal discourse related to wills and probate law. It is, of course, a compound word: “heir” is exactly what we know it to be today, but “loom” at that time meant any tool or implement, not just for weaving. In the days when the family unit was also the primary location of economic production, the “tools” of one’s household assured its livelihood and its future in a very direct way. Our modern use of the term—anything precious that is passed down through generations—did not come into ordinary speech, according to Etymonline.com, until the 1610s.

The Family Bible

Let’s take a look at one of the most common heirlooms today, the family Bible: a monumental, leather-bound Bible, often with colorful illustrations and perhaps extravagant illumination (artistic embellishment in the margins or surrounding certain letters). Most also contain pages for recording important events and milestones in the life of the family. The examples I routinely see in the Midwest date to the 1880s or 1890s.

These are indeed very impressive books, but are they valuable? Unfortunately, in almost every case, no. The Bible is the most printed book in the history of humankind. They are not rare, even these massive ones with exquisite decoration. Not only were they produced in huge numbers, but Bibles in general (but especially these) are rarely disposed of for any reason. Thus, the market supply of old Bibles is of biblical proportions, whereas the market demand for them is extremely low.

Most old Bibles have no commercial value at all. The important word here, though, is “commercial.” Heirlooms may or may not be valuable in the monetary sense, which is what makes them so tricky for personal property appraisers. An appraisal is an opinion of monetary value. Sentiment alone has no part in that calculation. So, unfortunately, I have found myself in the tender spot of telling a very sincere, elderly person that her grandfather’s precious Bible, an heirloom, isn’t worth anything.

But of course we all understand that that is absolutely not true! Family Bibles often contain records of extraordinary genealogical value, with lists of ancestors and marriages and births and deaths that are not memorialized anywhere else. Such records make each family Bible truly unique, irreplaceable, and thus invaluable. But its value is limited to the family unit, and even then, it’s the family history, not the book itself, that matters. Without its story, a family heirloom is just another thing.

How to Keep Your Heirlooms Alive

How many times have you come across a photograph in the bottom of an old trunk and you have no idea who any of those people are. Anyone who may have known is either also deceased or can’t see or remember well enough to say. In time, those photos will be tossed out. Or say you find a lovely old pocket watch among Grandpa’s things as you are sorting through his belongings after the funeral. You’d never seen it before and it is engraved with letters you do not recognize. That’s an awful moment because it triggers a decision. Even if you decide to keep the watch simply because “it was Grandpa’s,” in time it will come to mean less and less to his far-future descendants who never met him and (like you) do not know anything about the meaning of the watch. Like the old photos, it will eventually be tossed or sold. The heirloom dies.

So how do you keep an heirloom alive? Firmly plant it in the ground of your family. Identify the people and locations in photographs. Date anything you can. Write out each thing’s story. This requires conversations with elders and some research effort, but it will assure the future of your family’s past.

You don’t need any special skills to do this, just some time, care, and a plan for passing the information on along with the special object. Today, there are cloud-based services that can help. One such company is Artifcts.com. According to its website, Artifcts “offers a secure place to preserve the history, memories, and life experiences behind the objects of your life with images, audio, video, and text. With Artifcts, you can create a dynamic and shareable collection as unique as you!” Remember, your descendants are digital natives, and they are the ones you save your heirlooms for. Don’t resist technology and risk losing your treasures to time and decay.

Which brings me back to the dilemma of the family Bible, which has no commercial value and may be mouldering to dust even as we speak. What do you do with it when restoration is too costly to even contemplate? Is it worth keeping? Not really. Not the book, that is. Capture its stories. Transcribe all of the handwritten notes and lists and other family history recorded in its pages. This is harder than it might sound. Archaic handwriting and premodern inks can be very challenging to read 150 years later. Take your time and cherish the activity. Turn every single page looking for scraps of paper or notations you would otherwise easily overlook. Then, rather than throw it away or burn it (which people are very loathe to do), consider an interment ceremony. Gather your family, wrap it in a clean cloth, and bury it, let it go, solemnly and respectfully.

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I’d be interested in your thoughts on preserving or releasing family Bibles. Leave a comment or email me at CarolynLawAntiques@gmail.com.

Photo: Pierre Bamin on Unsplash.com

Let’s take an interesting example from my files: The Case of the Ugly Teapot.

What can you see? A teapot of course, but it’s a very unusual teapot when you start to look more intentionally. First of all, the spout looks like it was attached by a plumber! There’s nothing elegant or graceful about this teapot. I can’t imagine it being brought to the table for actual service. And there are other features that don’t look like any teapot I’ve ever seen in polite society. For instance, the thin lid’s hinge is pinned with a dangerous-looking piece of bent wire. The opening is not perfectly round, either, so the lid does not seal the pot, which any respectable teapot’s lid should. And another thing about that lid: the underside has what looks like a flame halo. Could it have been cut out with a torch? My impression from the basic once-over is that this teapot was never made for actual table use.

What is it made of? Well, obviously metal, but what kind? The magnet test reveals that it is entirely nonferrous. I know this because my magnet is not attracted to any part of it, so that eliminates iron and steel, but beyond that it’s really hard to say: silver over copper? tin? It’s too heavy to be aluminum and too light to be lead. The wear on the handle reveals a rosy/golden core, so it’s probably some alloy of copper and zinc or nickel with maybe a thin skin of silver, which is badly degraded and completely absent in spots. I suspect that parts of this pot began life as a proper silverplated teapot that was subsequently mutilated and cobbled together with other spare parts. A Frankenstein teapot.

Where and when was it made? Now this takes a bit more detailed inspection. From the outside there is nothing to suggest where or when it was made. I know it was purchased in the early 1990s in the United States, but there is nothing in style or decoration to suggest any particular time period or country of origin. So, let’s search for a mark of some kind. Bingo. Under the lid: “Needham’s patent.” Aha! That’s something I can work with.

Who made it? If I can find out something about this Needham, I may also be able to say when it was made. There’s a lot of bang for the evidentiary buck in a mark, and I fairly quickly find (through an internet search) a silverplated calling card case with this exact mark. Through its auction description, I learn that Needham was in business 1889-1925 in Sheffield, England. Now I’m really getting somewhere! It wasn’t hard thereafter to discover that the Needhams were a family of cutlers, silver platers, and inventors in Sheffield going back to the 1700s.

As I searched further for information specifically about “Needham’s patents,”
I came across an interesting notice of an 1892 abridgement to Patent 5104 Stands for table use held by A.J. and H.C. Needham and W. Hendy. And there I found what I think is the smoking gun . . . er, teapot.

Why was it made? And now I can form a hypothesis about this thing. I think this is a prototype for a British patent application, not an actual production example of the invention. It was probably made in 1889 or 1890, around the time of the original application, to demonstrate the stand, not the pot per se. Now, of course, this is only my hypothesis. I don’t know for certain that it is a patent prototype, but now I can begin additional research from this hypothesis to learn more about the Needham family and their inventions, to try to document its existence in other ways. How it came to the US and eventually landed on my office bookshelf may never be knowable.

What does it mean today? The monetary value of this thing is, in my opinion, very low. Even though it is surely one of a kind, it’s ugly, it’s unusable, it’s in rough condition. But it does inspire conversation so, as a curiosity, it might be worth a few dollars. If it isn’t worth much as a teapot, is it worth anything as a prototype? Prototypes, like salesman’s samples and patent drawings, are indeed very collectible and some are quite valuable. The Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, DE, has an excellent collection of patent models. From such artifacts we can learn a great deal not only about industrial history but also about human ingenuity and the material concerns and values of societies at different historical eras. In late Victorian England, the pouring of tea was a matter of some social concern, but today not so much, so is there any historical value in this ugly teapot? Probably not. It’s incomplete in any case and it’s not even the star of the invention itself. No, it’s not worth anything really, except the 947 words I’ve given it.

A woman contacted me via Facebook about a small, two-handled cup that was among her mother’s possessions. It is engraved: Sears National Baby Contest/Prize Winner/1934. This object has very little monetary value, less than $20, yet to my mind this little thing is truly a treasure–not rare, not valuable, but a treasure nonetheless. Its richness lies in its backstory.

The cup is silverplated, made by Homan Manufacturing Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. Homan was a well-known maker of affordable silverplated items for everyday church and domestic use. The company was founded in 1847 and it went out of business in 1941. The cup is only 2 ½ inches tall and was not expensive. About 10,000 were distributed. I don’t know how many examples still exist today, but families tend to hang on to them for sentimental reasons, so there may be many hundreds of them “out there” in closets and attics. They don’t come up for sale very often, but you may even see a few with the baby’s name also engraved on it, probably added later by the proud parents. Ultimately, these little cups are valued only by their families and generally do not inspire much interest otherwise. But it’s in that “otherwise” part where I think the real value of this object lies.

“Seeking America’s Most Beautiful Baby”

In 1934, Sears, Roebuck & Co., based in Chicago, held a national Most Beautiful Baby contest in conjunction with the Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, which ran from May 27-November 12, 1933, and from May 26-October 31, 1934. Photos of more than 114,000 babies were entered, vying for a total prize purse of $40,000 in cash, scholarships, and merchandise.

Babies competed in two age categories: up to 2 years and 3-5 years. The entry process began at the state level. The two age-group winners from each state were advanced to the Chicago Grand Prize competition (98 in all) and another 500 from each state formed a pool from which 15,000 “other national prizes” were awarded: 5,000 runners up would receive a copy of their photo enlarged, colored, and framed, and 10,000 more would receive a silverplated cup in an “attractive box.”

Visitors to the Sears Pavilion at the 1934 Fair voted for their favorites and little Marilyn Yvonne Miller of South Dakota won the national Grand Prize, with 24,000 votes. She was awarded $5,000 cash plus a $5,000 “college educational policy” compliments of R.E. Wood, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co.

Let’s Put This Contest in Context

By all accounts, the Century of Progress Expo and the Sears National Baby Contest were both roaring successes, especially so when you factor in what the country was going through at that time. Planning for the fair had begun in early 1928, well before the economic catastrophe of fall 1929. And despite what befell that fall, the fair not only opened as promised, but it even came back for an encore! Take THAT, Depression! Unlike the first Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the Century of Progress had an intentional forward-looking focus, designed to show a possible future full of wonders and technology and better days ahead. Oh, how the country needed that.

In 1934, average net income was $3,125.42–for those who had any income at all, of course. Only 4,094,420 tax returns were even filed for 1934 (US population was 126.37 million). So if your little bundle of joy could win 5,000 cash dollars . . . well, I don’t even have to finish that, do I.

What I find poignant in all of this is that every one of those qualifying babies had to have been born in the tragic first days, months, and years of the Great Depression, those awful days of shock and anxiety and growing hopelessness. I don’t think this was coincidental on the part of Sears. Rather than lament the precarious time it was to bring a baby into the world, Sears focused the country’s attention on the hope embodied in a baby, nurtured and cherished despite material hardships. Our future. Now our past.

The little girl who won this particular cup was born in 1931 in a small town in Illinois. For her descendants, it brings to life the story of how she won a prize in America’s Most Beautiful Baby Contest when she was 3 years old. That’s a private narrative in a specific family. But for the rest of us, it tells another story, this one a public narrative of the American experience. It’s a tiny thing, and yet it is so much more.

Sources:

Sears Archives, http://searsarchives.com/
Sears National Baby Contest Brochure, https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ead/pdf/century0208.pdf
“Statistics of Income for 1934,” https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/34soireppt1ar.pdf

Photos courtesy of the owner. Used with permission.

That all sounds perfectly fair and square. But FMV is really not quite so simple as that. The IRS is very specific about this, stipulating three critical conditions of a fair-market sale: 1) both buyer and seller must be willing to complete the transaction, 2) neither buyer nor seller may be compelled to buy or sell, and 3) both buyer and seller must have “reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts.” These criteria are meant to buffer FMV from the egregious outlier: a price that is conspicuously skewed one way or another by human circumstances, i.e., transactions involving someone who doesn’t want to sell or buy, is forced to sell or buy anyway, or who doesn’t know what they are selling or buying.

Take, for example, one of the biggest antiques stories of 2021: a Chinese Ming Dynasty porcelain bowl, about 6 inches in diameter, blue and white decoration. This thing was all over the auction news last spring when Sotheby’s announced it was coming up for sale. It was valued at $300,000-$500,000, which seems appropriate for a 600-year-old thing once used in the court of an Emperor. But the real news of this story was not in the remarkable object itself but in where it was found: a yard sale in New Haven, Connecticut. The buyer, called a “savvy bargain hunter” in some reports, paid $35 for it, no haggling required. What a deal!! The seller got what they asked for it and the buyer raced off and called a specialist before you could say “cha-ching.” Sotheby’s subsequently sold the bowl for $721,800.

As you may detect in my tone, I have some problems with this story, but I want to be very clear that everything about these separate transactions was perfectly legal and no one in the situation did anything remotely wrong in the general sense of the open marketplace or principles of private treaty. The buyer did not literally steal the bowl from the table set up in the driveway of the seller. But if they had, would they have been charged with a misdemeanor (theft of $35) or a felony (theft over half a million)?

Most people see this story as a dream come true. In fact, it’s just this kind of thing that drives a lot of people to the flea market every Saturday morning to sift through mountains of other people’s crap. But as an appraiser, this story makes me very uncomfortable. Obviously, the yard-sale transaction clearly violates the third prong of FMV. The seller did not have sufficient knowledge of the relevant facts. Of course, a buyer is under no obligation to educate a seller on what they have. And that’s precisely why you should never accept an appraisal from someone who wants to buy the item, who makes an offer on it, or who charges a percentage of their valuation.

Another matter here is about provenance. Where the heck did the yard-sale seller even get this thing? Had it been stolen at some point in its history? Did the yard-sale seller know anything at all about it before setting it out that fateful day? Had they paid $20 for it ten years before, no questions asked, or was it found in a box in the attic? There’s a ton of questions for the seller here. Then from the buyer’s position, if it were you, thinking you were on to something good here, would you have handed the seller a hundred dollar bill and said, “Keep the change”? Or once the news hit the papers, would you have offered to give the yard-sale seller a cut of the auction bounty? What would that even be? A few hundred? Some thousands? Half?

At the end of the day, what’s done is done in this case. My interest now in sharing this story is not to make moral judgments on what occurred or should have occurred but to emphasize that everyone should learn about their valuables before selling them and the best way to get the “relevant facts” is through certified appraisal, an independent, objective opinion of value based on material characteristics and comparable prior sales. Certified appraisers commit to a Code of Ethics: never to suppress facts, never to misrepresent one’s qualifications, never to be influenced by third parties. In the case of this Chinese bowl, a certified appraisal by a qualified professional may have cost several hundred dollars, but for that investment, the yard-sale owner would have been the one to enjoy the extraordinary windfall realized at auction. This is a clear case of “seller prepare,” not “buyer beware.”

I didn’t reveal to him that I live in a thermostat museum.

My house was built in 1924. When we moved in, a little more than 70 years later, we discovered four thermostats mounted on three different walls in three different rooms. Only one was in working order, the other three apparently vestigial. Now I sometimes like to guide guests around from room to room, narrating the history of temperature regulation technology displayed on my walls.

The history of thermostats (yes, there is one) goes way back to the 17^th century, but those were essentially scientific instruments that eventually found some practical applications in industry and research. For our purposes, the first thermostat for ordinary domestic use was offered by Honeywell in 1906.

Since then, the thermostat’s technological development has been straight up! An “onboard” clock was introduced in the 1930s. They became programmable in the 1980s, and by 2007, the humble thermostat had gotten “smart” and took its seat on the internet of things.

All that technological innovation notwithstanding, the basic function of the thermostat remains the same as it ever was: automatic temperature control. In the early 20^th century, this was an electromechanical process accomplished through an ingenious application of physics whereby certain metals expand and contract in predictable ways. A laminated sandwich of two such metals, variously sensitive to temperature, in a coil or strip, are attached to a vial of mercury such that when the coil contracts in one direction to the specified temperature target, the mercury vial tips (aka the mercury switch), thus tripping the furnace off or on accordingly.

So back to my house. The oldest example in my collection (a White-Rodgers Type 214) is in the foyer near the kitchen entry and doorway to the basement. The White-Rodgers Company was formed in 1937. It’s a real beauty with a dramatic coil exposed atop its no-nonsense metal casing. Then, probably in the late 1940s, a new thermostat was installed in the dining room, this one much more conscious of its domestic surroundings. Its creamy Bakelite casing is softer, rounder, and notably less industrial.

When we moved in at the very end of 1995, the furnace was controlled by an uninspired, plastic box thermostat in the living room, but curiously it was right beside an iconic Mid-Century Modern dial-style thermostat, c. 1960s. In 2008, we finally replaced the old oil-burning furnace for clean, efficient, natural gas and upgraded the thermostat to an eco-friendly digital wonder. Regrettably, we sensibly installed the new one over the others’ existing holes in the living room location and our sensible furnace man sensibly carried them away. Alas, how I wish now we’d kept them in situ to complete my exhibit!

Why would the previous owners leave an old thermostat on the wall? Why install a new thermostat in a different location? My guess is mercury! Old thermostats contain mercury, an extremely hazardous but very rolly-polly material, perfect for electromechanical thermostats but not so much for human contact. Mercury thermostats should never be thrown out in the residential trash. Many municipalities have special disposal sites, but I would be reluctant to even handle one, which is why I believe previous owners of my house decided to leave them “as found,” as they say. Like asbestos, “do not disturb” is the most cost-effective strategy for living intimately with a deadly substance, but when it must be handled, call in a professional.

Whatever the reason these thermostats survived on my walls, I’m delighted that they did. I like to be reminded of my home’s material past. The thermostats are tangible evidence of this building’s own story, independent of me, sharing its 100 years of technology, innovation, and industrial design.

Take the case of one of my own family’s legends told (sort of) through a brown jug.

For all my life I had heard the story of my mother’s wealthy and important cousins, the McCormicks of McCormick Whiskey fame and fortune. The McCormick Distilling Company, “the oldest distillery west of the Mississippi River still operating in its original location,” is very much alive today and producing spirits in historic Weston, Missouri. But by researching the collectible decanters and little brown jugs produced by McCormick from 1968-1987, I learned that any family connection to that enterprise is a good deal less direct than I had been led to believe.

In 1856, the colorful stagecoach mogul Ben Holladay and his brother David opened a distillery in Weston. After Holladay’s death in 1887, the business passed to David and then to his son-in-law, and the operation changed hands at least once again around the turn of the century and eventually landed with another pair of brothers, named Singer, soon after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

Hmmm. Nary a McCormick anywhere in this story so far. Do I have the right historic distillery in Platte County, Missouri? Well, as it turns out, there was more than one distillery in the area and one was indeed owned by a McCormick. Now we are getting somewhere. Sort of.

My mother’s grandfather, Richard Wiley Stallard, had two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, who married brothers, J.T. and Arthur McCormick. Platte County, in the northwest horn of Missouri, was populated in the middle of the 19^th century by waves of migrants from Virginia and Kentucky, and both the Stallards and the McCormicks hailed from Culpeper County, Virginia, in particular. The distinctly Southern character of Platte County (part of Missouri’s “Little Dixie” region) was evident not only in the people’s politics, culture, and customs but in the county’s early industry and commerce as well, of which hemp, tobacco, and whiskey figured prominently.

In 1888, J.T. McCormick entered the lucrative liquor market with his McCormick Mercantile and Distillery Co. located in Waldron, Missouri, 18 miles south of Weston, where the Holladay outfit was already well established. J.T.’s two sons, E.R. and W.T., took over the family distillery in 1909. These men were my mother’s dad’s first cousins, making them her first cousins once removed, in that her great-grandfather, Randolph Stallard, was E.R.’s grandpa.

Of course, Prohibition reduced all distillery operations in Platte County to a trickle for almost 14 years, from January 1920 to December 1933, during which time my mother was born in 1921. However, by the time Prohibition was lifted (right in the thick of the Depression, no less), E.R.’s wife had reportedly “got religion” and refused to “allow” her husband to reopen the distillery, so in 1939 (or maybe it was 1942) the McCormick Distillery Co. was sold to the Singer brothers, who for all intents and purposes merely acquired the McCormick brand, since the operation itself had never restarted after Repeal. The name remains the distiller’s trademark to this day.

In 1965, under yet more new owners, the company trademarked the facsimile “signature” of E.R. McCormick, but by then that historical person was more like the fictional Betty Crocker, really nothing more than a marketing figure.

Huh.

So unfortunately, my family connection with today’s McCormick Distilling is very, very thin indeed. In fact, the McCormicks were essentially out of the distillery business before my mother was even born. All that remains of the family story is in the name on moderately priced spirits and hundreds of little brown jugs of Platte Valley straight corn whiskey (usually empty) for sale on Ebay.

There are lessons in this example for both the genealogist and the appraiser. First, family stories of objects should never be assumed to be accurate. Trust but verify. Second, using a family story to interrogate a tangible object (or vice versa) is a fruitful research technique because the material culture of a family may hold solid evidence about who, where, and when, especially when oral tradition and family trees are murky or muddled. And finally, for the appraiser, breaking the news to a client that findings of material culture research refute family history is really hard and calls for a compassionate understanding of what both stories and things contribute to a family’s identity.

References:
https://www.fohbc.org/PDF_Files/Sullivan_Holladay.pdf
http://genealogytrails.com/mo/platte/bios_m.htm

They come in all shapes and sizes, from palatial mansion to the most humble cabin. It might be a property of the park district, the local historical society, or even the National Park Service. It could be the civic enterprise of a noteworthy family or the quirky legacy of a local eccentric.  The house museum is indeed a mixed bag, but that’s its charm and ultimately its importance.

In the most general sense, a museum is defined by the the International Council of Museums as “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.” That’s quite a broad definition, but when most people hear the word “museum,” they picture something very specific: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian.

We all have memories of being bundled onto buses (signed permission slips in hand) for a field trip to  ______________ (fill in the name your hometown’s monumental museum). In my case, it was the awe-inspiring Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. For us kids, those field trips were very exciting in theory but pretty boring in actual fact. I think that’s largely because of two things: the hushed formality of these places is intimidating and the disembodied “otherness” of their collections is unrelatable.

Institutional museums traditionally collect the best, the most precious, the irreplaceable, so these things must be exhibited behind glass or in sealed, climate-controlled cases, keeping the public at arm’s length. This kind of treatment is necessary for the conservation of artifacts that would otherwise be totally inaccessible or even lost entirely. Yes, institutional museums play a hugely important role in our preservation and understanding of human culture and, to be fair, many museums today are changing their practices to be less otherwordly.

Still, conventional museum treatment inevitably puts objects in a weird landscape most people don’t recognize, a contrived place far removed from the objects’ original purpose, use, or life. Once a thing is pulled out of the stream of human enterprise, it stops, it kind of dies. A thing in such surroundings is fundamentally changed from whatever it once was to a new thing altogether: a museum piece.

The house museum scales back material culture to human size and displays objects in a recognizable context.

The defining characteristic of the house museum is its display of objects in their “natural” habitat. Even when the furnishings and decorative arts are not original to that specific house, they are usually displayed as they would have been used or enjoyed in such a space and time, whether it’s a painting in the library, a gilded console table in the foyer, or a new-fangled mangle in the basement laundry. Each object is chosen and displayed not for its importance in the world but for its importance in a specific place. House museum collections thus reflect a range of quality, personal taste, wear and tear and damage, and social class. In that way, things there are very human, which brings me to the characteristic of house museums I value most: engagement.

Visitors to house museums enjoy an intimacy and interaction with the place, its history, its occupants and their possessions, that are difficult for an institution to equal. In large traditional museums, “guided” tours are usually recorded mini-lectures delivered via technology and “engagement” depends heavily on sophisticated reading skills. House museum tours, on the other hand, are usually conducted in small groups led by knowledgeable volunteer docents, real people who are highly motivated and eager to share “their” house with you. Mary, a docent at the Ellwood House in DeKalb, Illinois, explains why she volunteers:

I enjoy regular interactions with visitors and the staff. People do not visit the property unless they are genuinely interested in some aspect of the house, family, or town history. I tend to learn something of interest from guests with each tour, or a question that I cannot answer leads to further insights from staff to share in the future.

She’s also very conscious of the importance of the house in her community and the unique value of house museums in general:

So many grand homes have been torn down in the name of “progress.” Houses that do survive speak to a strength of a community. … [T]he folks who formed and perpetuated the House Association have worked tirelessly to … preserve and restore [the Ellwood House]. Because the grounds are also a city park, they are used daily, year around …. In so many ways, the house stays current and is a focal point for community pride.

House museums are truly treasures nearby. They make for stimulating and affordable day trips for all ages. To find a house museum in your area, start with the list at Old Houses.com.

The servants’ entrance of the Glessner House, Chicago, IL

The Glessner House (1887), 1800 S Prairie Avenue, Chicago IL
The Ellwood House (1879), 420 Linden Place, DeKalb IL

   Lawn of the Ellwood House, DeKalb, IL

A common misunderstanding about appraisers, partly the fault of the Antiques Roadshow, is that an appraiser can simply look at a thing with her naked eye and somehow just know what it is, its life story, and what it’s worth. Indeed, years of firsthand experience and formal or self-education certainly make an appraiser more knowledgeable than the average Joe, especially those of us who have a specific subject area of expertise. For example, as a sterling silver specialist, I can look superficially at a silver object and say quite a lot about it off the top of my head, without additional research or intensive examination. But that only scratches the surface. Even for objects I superficially recognize, it is only by intentional looking that I can truly understand what a thing is and what a thing is worth relative to others like it. And that, in a nutshell, is the appraiser’s job.

As for the essential habit of mind, an appraiser who is not temperamentally curious will be neither very good at appraising nor very happy in the business. As a generalist personal property appraiser, I am thrilled when a client approaches me with some object that’s outside of my knowledge base. Every assignment becomes a learning opportunity.

One of my favorite professional duties of owning my own antiques appraisal business is selecting the continuing education that I’ll pursue each year. For 2021, I knew exactly the program I wanted: Randy Wilkinson’s Wood Identification Workshop. The workshop had been cancelled, of course, in 2020, so I contacted him as soon as I was vaccinated in April asking if it would go forward this year. He assured me that they were on track for an in-person weekend in September and that it would be held at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. I said, “Sign me up.”

As I invisioned my appraisal business in the past few years, I knew that silver would not constitute the majority of it. In fact, in 2021 I’ve been asked to appraise clocks, a 19th-century bedroom set, a Grand Rapids-made tea wagon, and a fireplace mantel/surround, all wooden things. That being the case, I knew this year I wanted advanced training in wood identification and there’s no better teacher than Randy Wilkinson, partner and master conservator at Fallon & Wilkinson, Baltic, Connecticut.

Randy’s Wood Identification Workshop is unique in the United States in that it offers hands-on instruction in the macroscopic and microscopic techniques of wood identification at the cellular level but then also applies those techniques to the practical examination and identification of finished objects, the kinds of things antiques appraisers and dealers encounter virtually every day.

But wood anatomy, cell structure? Don’t antiques people just know one wood from another by looking at a lot of wood? Generally speaking, yes, most people can detect oak from other woods, for example, by experience, but which oak is it? Red or white? The truth is, wood species cannot be identified definitively by surface examination alone. Then add on a couple centuries of smoke, dirt, cleaning products, paint, finishing and refinishing, and it may become virtually impossible for anyone to distinguish one wood from another except under magnification. With magnification, the cell structures of wood may be discerned, and cellular structure is diagnostic.

For professional appraisal practice, the implications of science-based wood identification are tremendous. Definitive wood identification can help to place an object in a geographical region of origin. It may provide evidence for attribution to a specific maker known to work in a particular wood. It helps to expose fakes and also to spot otherwise honest repairs or restoration that may affect value. It may support or refute the provenance of an individual piece.

On Day 1, Randy summarized what we were about to learn: “Wood identification is the recognition of patterns.” I call that intentional looking, knowing not only what to look for but also how to look for it and then how to interpret what one sees in the context of known others.

I had an amazing experience at the 2021 Fallon & Wilkinson Wood Identification Workshop, where I met many wonderful people–conservators, curators, appraisers, auctioneers, and artists. The setting provided by the Mystic Seaport Museum was spectacular. Thank you to MSM for allowing generous access to its historic artifacts, collections, and exhibits. Thank you especially to Randy Wilkinson for sharing his extensive knowledge of wood and practical expertise in a most engaging and enjoyable way.

The Japanese have long appreciated the beauty, richness, and meaning to be found in the flaw, the imperfection, things most Westerners abhor. They call it wabi sabi, an aesthetic derived from Zen Buddhist principles, and in the simplest terms, it reflects a recognition and acceptance of the imperfection and impermanence of life. I won’t insult the depth of this profound philosophy and practice by trying to explain it or treat it like some decorating trend. There are many good resources to learn more about it, including the recent article I’ve linked at the end of this post. Suffice it to say here, the term is essentially untranslatable in English, which is a dead giveaway that it’s something European-identified folks don’t easily “get.”

Antiques, of course, perfectly exemplify the imperfect, with all their bumps and bruises, wear and tear, and decay earned over many years. An old object often carries on its surface the marks of human beings it has encountered along the way, for better or for worse. But that record, usually called “damage” in the trade, is the narrator of its story. Some collectors tolerate no or virtually no damage. Museum pieces are also usually the most perfect examples of any thing, but significantly, these are also the ones pulled out of the stream of real life. In a way, once the perfect examples are encased, they die.

Kintsugi, “golden joinery.” Photo Motoki Tonn on Unsplash.com.

Kintsugi is a lovely and ancient wabi sabi practice (also Japanese) of repairing broken things, usually pottery. Rather than hide a break, kintsugi calls attention to the damage using the most precious material around: gold. In this way, the object reminds us that fragile things get broken, porcelain as well as people, but they can recover and live again more beautifully because of the experience.

In Europe, after the porcelain code was cracked at Meissen in the early 18^th century, everyday people in the West could enjoy more china items in more everyday ways and thus they broke a lot of teacups and dishes over the years. Porcelain and other china goods were still expensive and thus precious in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, though, so an accident would have to be truly catastrophic to warrant throwing a piece away. China mending became a highly skilled trade, often using the ingenious staple method (yes, also Asian in origin). If you’ve never seen a stapled dish, check out Andrew Baseman’s gorgeous post, “Stapled Bowl with Birds and Insects, c. 1830,” on his fascinating blog, Past Imperfect: The Art of Inventive Repair, http://blog.andrewbaseman.com/?p=11501.

Alas, by the time I bought my mug in late 20^th-century America, the West had fully embraced the disposable lifestyle and my mug was broken and thrown away at some point. I don’t even remember exactly what happened to it or when, just that I do not have it anymore. And now even that is part of its story, too. All products of human activity, even the well-loved and admired ones, are passing away in the big picture of things. Sometimes no amount of care and skill can fix the damage or resurrect a piece from utter loss. Decay, breakage, destruction—despite our best efforts, these experiences will almost certainly become part of every breakable thing’s life story eventually. And like our own lives, it is our imperfections and rough patches that tell the story of our existence.

Cover photo: Annie Spratt on Unsplash.com

Read More:

“What Is Wabi Sabi? The Elusive Beauty of Imperfection,” by Anne Walther, January 8, 2021,
https://japanobjects.com/features/wabi-sabi

What we casually call “silver” is never really silver in the pure sense, and there are different levels of silver content found in many different types of common silver objects. Most people mean “sterling” silver when they use the word generally. Luckily, sterling silver will almost always announce itself, but in different ways in different countries of origin.

The alloy of sterling has been strictly regulated in all English silver production for at least 700 years. The “lion passant” (a walking lion, second mark from the left on the spoon handle illustrated) indicates English sterling quality: 92.5% silver to 7.5% something else, usually copper.

The alloy quality of silver outside of England will sometimes be indicated numerically: 925 for sterling, of course, but you might also see anything from 800 (usually German) to 958 (English Britannia standard), which was the quality for English silver enforced by law between 1697 and 1720, but it is still legal even today. In England, this higher silver content is indicated by the figure of Britannia in place of the sterling lion passant. Britannia standard is not very practical for everyday items because it is just too soft to withstand daily use.

The first silver production in the American Colonies obviously derived from the silversmithing practices of England, but for some reason, the precise, institutionalized system of assay and hallmarking never took hold in Colonial America or subsequently the United States, except for a brief time in Baltimore between 1814 and 1830.

Fine old American silver may be of two possible silver alloys: coin (89.2%-90% pure silver) and sterling (92.5%). Lacking a source of refined silver or the infrastructure necessary to produce it in-house, so to speak, silversmiths in the Colonies relied on recycling to obtain their raw material, melting down Spanish coins or existing English sterling items that they or their customers may have had on hand. In either case, the silver content of American silver will usually be spelled out on it: sterling or coin. I say “usually” because there’s a lot of silver out there that’s inexplicably unmarked.

In the absence of any marks at all, regardless of its place of origin, the quality of the silver cannot be determined by the naked eye. Sometimes the marks on sterling silver can be rubbed off, so you don’t want to automatically assume an unmarked piece is not sterling. On the other hand, one should never represent silver as sterling without some evidence that it really is of that quality. When confronted with a totally unmarked piece of silver about which you know nothing else, you could test it, but this process involves acids and scraping samples off the suspect piece, both of which introduce a measure of danger I am rarely eager to face. In my opinion, the acid test is only worth the risk in cases where I am confident, based on other evidence, that the legitimate valuation of the item depends on identification.

The Scoop on Silverplate

The spot price of sterling silver has been pretty steady in recent years, hovering around $25  per Troy ounce, so sterling silver objects always retain some value. Silverplate, on the other hand, has precious little precious metal on it, so the value of silverplated ware is purely decorative and utilitarian. Luckily, plated ware is easy to distinguish from sterling silver if you know how to read the marks.

A great many plated items will be marked with some version of EPNS, which stands for “electroplated nickel silver.” As a base metal, nickel has the advantage of being a “silvery” metal itself, unlike the distinctively reddish hue of copper, so even if the plating is completely worn away (which can happen), the article will still look “silver” to the eye.

Other common marks to look for on silverplate are “EP”  (as shown in the oblong mark second from the right on this fiddle-style spoon), “SP,” “SP copper,” or the words “double,” “triple,” “quadruple,” or “soldered.”

Unlike sterling, there is no inherent value to silverplate, so the only thing to do is enjoy it!

A slightly modified version of this article first appeared in the Olde Timers Gazette (August 2019), the dealers’ newsletter of Olde Timers Antique Centre, Sandwich, Illinois.