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Guest
Curator Article
Who’s Your Daddy? Families in Early
American Needlework
Needlework
Exhibition and Conference at Winterthur
Museum
By
Alison Buchbinder, Samantha Dorsey, and Linda
Eaton
Historians
have long recognized that family networks play a crucial role in
the political, commercial and religious activities of both men and
women. On a more personal level, many people researching their family
genealogy have been frustrated at the difficulty finding their female
ancestors. An exhibition and conference at Winterthur Museum entitled
Who’s Your Daddy? Families in Early American Needlework
explores how needlework can serve as primary-source material for
understanding the history of families in early America .
Family
connections can determine a person’s status in society. Obvious
examples are the embroidered coats of arms worked by schoolgirls
in the 18 th and early 19 th centuries. Sarah Holsworth’s sampler
shows a very different aspect of this phenomenon, documenting not
her own family but that of her teacher, Leah Galligher. Married
in 1791, Leah Galligher and her husband, Francis, opened a school
in Lancaster in 1797. Clearly there were problems with their marriage,
as Leah filed for divorce soon after this sampler was made. The
reason cited for her divorce was her husband’s impotency, which
made the couple a focus of both gossip and slander. Perhaps Leah’s
family history, displayed so publicly in the Holsworth home, was
intended to document her respectability.
Many
samplers list the names of parents and other close family members,
providing genealogical information that is often elusive in more
formal records. But Sarah Talley’s sampler documents a family tragedy.
Listing the names and birth dates of her siblings on her sampler,
we can see that the youngest, Lydia and Elihu, were twins born two
days apart. Sarah’s mother, Lydia Forwood Talley, died on the day
the second twin was born. Normally young girls worked simple marking
samplers when they were about ten years old, but Sarah was seventeen
in 1798. Since that was the year her father remarried, we can assume
that Sarah had taken over the care of her younger siblings on the
death of her mother, and would have had neither the time nor the
opportunity to attend Mary Sullevan’s school, where she worked her
sampler.
Sarah
Wistar’s silkwork birds would be anonymous without the inscriptions
on the back. She wrote on each one that it had been made in 1752,
and designated them as gifts to her two great-nieces, Rebecca and
Catharine. Later descendants added genealogical information about
all three women, thereby documenting not only patterns of inheritance
but the pride felt by their descendants in being part of the Wistar
family. Often passed down through the women’s side of families,
fragile early needlework only survives because it has been valued
by generations of family members.
Gallery
guides containing photographs will be available in the exhibition.
Check Winterthur ’s website ( www.winterthur.org
) for an on-line version of the exhibition in early 2009.
Winterthur Museum & Country
Estate
Winterthur, Delaware
October 4, 2008 - January
9, 2009
The Conference is scheduled
for
Friday, October 17 - Saturday,
October 18
For registration please call
800-448-3883
or visit winterthur.org
for further information
Figure
1.
Sampler
made by Sarah Holsworth
Lancaster
, Pennsylvania ; 1799
Silk
embroidered on linen
1957.671
Bequest of Henry Francis du Pont
Figure
2.
Sampler
made by Sarah Talley
Talleyville
, Delaware ; 1798
Silk
on linen
2000.67
Gift of Samuel A. Goodley and Marian Goodley Ebersole
Figure
3-4.
Silkwork
picture (and backboard)
Made
by Sarah Wistar
Philadelphia
, Pennsylvania ; 1752
Silk
on silk
1964.120.1
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