Who knows about embroidered samplers?

[chinakay]

First, let me tell you a story...

My great-great grandfather William JUBB, born Mirfield, WRY in 1822, had a wife named Hannah. She was in the 1851 and 1861 censuses. William and Hannah's first child Tom was born in 1845, so I looked for a marriage in 1844 and found: William JUBB married Hannah MANDLE at Wakefield, 1844. I couldn't find any MANDLE family nearby, despite Hannah's apparently being born in Mirfield, and this bothered me. But it was the only JUBB-Hannah marriage in any of the indexes.

But, I put the whole thing on hold to concentrate on my husband's family.

I got back to my own family in the New Year. I sent for the marriage certificate and it arrived a week ago. It was the wrong William JUBB and wrong Hannah!!!

I checked all the indexes over and over...I was stuck. No JUBB-Hannah Anybody marriage.

Then I remembered the unindexed page views at Ancestry. William was there, married at Dewsbury district in 1844, page 22 of Vol 22.

But who did he marry? No index, no clues.

Well, this beautiful sampler had been in the family forever. My mother had had it framed twice, but she didn't know who had made it. She thought it must have been someone from the family, but that was all. I had looked for a Hannah Sheard in the IGI, and there were several. I'd looked for a marriage in FBMD but found nothing that rang any bells.

So, I just entered Hannah SHEARD in the unindexed page views. And there she was, on page 22 of Vol 22. My jaw dropped and I sat staring...I couldn't believe what I was looking at.

The little girl who stitched this sampler was my own great-great grandmother. She has hung on my wall my whole life, and I have only just now discovered her.

Is there anyone who knows all about samplers? How long they would take to make, how much time every day a girl might spend on one? Is this a good one? Have the colours stayed true? Is there anything I can learn about a girl's personality from it? Was she sweet?

Thanks,
China (who is still glowing )

[hepburn]

I can see you glowing,what a great story!!

[bearkat]

What a lovely sampler.  I'm so jealous.
It looks well preserved, especially in view of it's date, 1828 - I think reds are particularly prone to fading.

[Guy Etchells]

The Samplers Guild may be able to answer your questions
http://www.thesamplerguild.co.uk/
Cheers
Guy

[chinakay]

Thank you very much, Guy, I'll have a look.
C

[Keith Sherwood]

Hi, China,
What an amazing story.  A few years ago I was hunting for the whereabouts of a family sampler that was created between 1768 and 1794 and the transcript of it was relayed by letter between a gt-aunt of mine and the person who owned it in the late 1960's.  Since then the trail has gone completely cold...
However, I was invited to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where the woman who looked after the sampler collections there gave me a wonderful private guided tour.
I think their collection is probably second only to the Victoria and Albert Museum's in South Kensington, London; there you can draw out panels with mounted samplers on them and gaze in awe at the craftsmanship.
Both museums have a variety of books on samplers, and the website that Guy has given you is a good one.  I'm racking my brains to try and remember who it was about 3 or 4 years ago who contacted me to say they were building up a database of known samplers - somewhere in the West Country, very vague of me - but I'll try and hunt the contact down.
Without our 18thC GURNER sampler we would never have pieced together the tree, as all the baptisms were Nonconformist and difficult to track down otherwise.  Having once visited the family home in a small village in Ickleton, Cambs, I was able to let my imagination go, thinking of Sarah GURNER sewing the family details on a seat by the window, trying to catch the last of the daylight, nearly 250 years ago...
keith

[chinakay]

Wow, Keith. Family history stitched through time.

Have you tried entering choice bits of the text into a good search engine? You never know what's on the web....

Good luck!

China

[KarenM]

Hi China,

What a great story.  My mil has this sampler in her house and when I saw yours I thought of the one she had, some of the things are so similar, trees, baskets, how two letters are one colour and then the next two different colours.

I wonder if there was, um, not a rule, but certain things that the young girls had to put on their samplers?

Karen

[Berlin-Bob]

I wonder if there was, um, not a rule, but certain things that the young girls had to put on their samplers?

Maybe not so much "had to", but there was some kind of teacher-training book or lesson or tips with an example, that was simply taken over by several generations of teachers and/or pupils who didn't have any other ideas.

(they do look a bit similiar  )

Bob