Every item on the cover is special but, as I’ve noted before, often the aesthetic pleasures of the objects can mask the pain or violence of a family experience. Such is the case with this wonderful sampler, a family record worked by Laura Goodale when she was a teenager, and later submitted as genealogical evidence in her mother’s application to receive a veteran’s widow’s pension. Laura’s father, Chester Goodale, had enlisted in a regiment of the Connecticut line when he was just a teenager, and served 15 months or so. Many decades later, just a few years from his death in 1835, he applied for and was awarded a veteran’s pension; it was on the basis of this pension that his widow, Asenath, made her own application that resulted in submitting Laura’s sampler.
Laura probably worked the sampler around 1809, when she was 16 (the same age as her father when he enlisted), and later added another sibling along the bottom border. Family records were a regular theme for young women’s samplers in the very late 18th and into the 19th centuries, as documented by extraordinary scholarship including the pathbreaking work of Betty Ring. This one is one of a handful in the collections of the US National Archives that were submitted as evidence for pensions or other purposes (including land claims). Six illustrative examples appear on the NARA website, worked between 1787 and 1818, with birth and marriage dates. Other examples can be seen elsewhere in the files; though not all have color images, we can still appreciate their emotional texture.
Among them are these tattered ones by Martha (Patsy) Bonner and Elizabeth Earl, submitted as part of pension applications they they made, like Asenath Goodale’s, many decades into the nineteenth century.
Textiles in general were valuable household items, as so many fine scholars and others have written about. These make me think both of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s work on New England textiles that became treasured items, mostly those of free, white women, and also of Tiya Miles’s wonderful book on the stitched family heirloom known as Ashley’s sack.
I’d love to see this write-up on the National Archives website, which acknowledges Laura as a family historian and is part of a lesson plan for the sampler, update links and add a bit more context! In particular I think there is an impression that samplers were offered as evidence of genealogical information because that information wasn’t otherwise collected. In the case of Goodale’s we know that’s not the case, that the town of Richmond, Massachusetts (in Berkshire County) recorded Asenah and Chester’s marriage –but on July 10, 1790 (not August as Laura thought/ was told, and stitched into the historical record). It is so important not to caricature early American record-keeping as sloppy or to contrast it with our contemporary experience. After all, as we know there are plenty of people who don’t keep their own good records, and there are times when mistakes are made by officials or family.
But I keep saying that these will be short posts (tidbits) so will stop here– despite, as always, the many threads we could keep pulling.