Investigations and an Unexpected Find!

In my last post, I talked about the missing Fairfield coat of arms.  Since then, there has been a significant bit of progress, in that I have heard from the daughter-in-law of one of the children of the man who owned the coat of arms when Wynn Cowan Fairfield visited him, sometime before he printed the Fairfield genealogy in 1953--does that sound complicated, or what? Both of those two children are alive and well, and the family share an active connection, so I am ever so hopeful that one of them will remember seeing the coat of arms and recall what became of it.  And, of course, that it will be re-found (if missing at all!) and that it will relate to the Cutts family coat of arms that we have in the Saco Museum collection that we know was stitched at the Boston female academy of Eleanor Druitt.

But yesterday I made an unexpected find, as well.  For many years, I have known about the lovely family register sampler owned by the Wells Public Library, made by Hannah Hill. It was included in I My Needle Ply With Skill. Late last fall I learned of a related Wells, Maine sampler stitched by Abigail Bragdon and owned by Strawbery Banke. Although the two samplers are not nearly identical, they share a common dividing band and alphabets and enough other similarities that I believed they had been made under the instruction of the same as yet unidentified teacher in Wells. When I dropped the Flavilla Barker sampler off yesterday at the Androscoggin Historical Society in Auburn, the lady there very kindly showed me the rest of their samplers (which I hadn't previously known about.)

One was a rather plain marking sampler, badly faded, but the other three...egads! One is the twin of the sampler made by Hannah Hill. One is the twin of the sampler made by Abigail Bragdon and the third is an interesting hybrid of the two. I came unprepared for discoveries and didn't have my camera along. I tried to photograph them with my aged cell phone, but the pictures are wretched. I have asked the AHS people if they would please send me the girls' names and related dates, and to take a look back to see if they know who donated the samplers and when. Two of the AHS girls were Littlefield daughters, Littlefield being pretty much the most common surname in Wells. The third was (I believe it says) Olive I. Gooch. The fact that all three of these ended up in Auburn (not especially close to Wells) implies that they may have all been owned by the same family and passed down together, and that the three girls were most likely related.

As soon as I have the names, I'll get busy on the research on the girls. It would be particularly telling if they are also somehow related to Hannah Hill and Abigail Bragdon--although in my first go-round of research I found no connection between those two. If the whole group of girls turned out to be closely related, then I might begin to wonder if the samplers are not evidence of an academy, but that perhaps instead the whole group of girls were taught by some kindly--and talented--maiden aunt or something. Hannah's was made in 1827, Abigails in 1832, one of the ones at AHS in 1836, one I can't read, and the last made by Olive Gooch was stiched when she was ten, which would have been 1832, all of which says that if an academy was the source, it lasted for close to ten years--and I ought to somehow be able to find some record of it! Below are the two from our exhibit. As soon as I have presentable pictures of the other three, I'll post those as well.

 

The detective-ing continues!

Last fall I "discovered" that Wynn Cowan Fairfield in his book The Descendants of John Fairfield of Wenham described a pair of embroidered coats of arms that he had seen in around (I presume) 1953, since the book was published in 1954. One was incomplete but the other, worked by Betsey Fairfield, was in the possession of Dr. Mark Hopkins Fairfield of Newton Heights, Massachusetts. Betsey just happens to have been the sister of Sally Fairfield who worked this unfinished sampler that is owned by the Brick Store Museum in  Kennebunk, Maine. And Sally was from here--Saco, Maine.

 



Sally's work is very closely related to several others, including the Betsey Bentley sampler that sold here in Maine back in around 2009. Another very similar sampler was done by Grace Welsh in 1774 and was pictured between pages 74 and 75 in American Samplers (Bolton & Coe.) They felt that the also pictured Abigail Mears' work and the work of Elizabeth Pecker were sufficiently similar as to be connected. However, Mears' and Pecker's samplers, while they have a similar scene at the bottom as the others, are alphabet samplers. The dogs-chasing-stag is such a popular motif that I don't think it alone is enough to make a couple of samplers certain to be from the same academy--however much I'd like them to be! Sukey Makepeace's (also pictured in American Samplers) however, is defintely one of the group.
     It's probably likely that Sally Fairfield and her sister Betsey attended the same school, so, if we could find it, seeing a coat of arms that was worked there might go a long way toward telling us a little more, since the teaching of the embroidery of coats of arms was less common than that of samplers. I continue to believe that all of this work may have emerged from the school of Eleanor Druitt. Unfortunately, the reason I think that is hardly set in concrete. We know from letters and receipts here in Saco that Thomas Cutts and Seth Storer of Saco both sent their several daughters to Druitt's at the same time their very good friend John Fairfield, father of Sally and Betsey, (and also a resident of Saco,) was sending his daughters to a Boston female academy. There is no proof positive that they all sent their girls to the same school, but I could believe that it may have happened that way. Since we own--and several others are documented--a coat of arms worked at Druitt's, if Betsey's could be found, and if it were very similar, well, oh joy!
     But Dr. Mark Hopkins Ward's offspring are hard to trace! His daughter, Anna B., was born in around 1928, and his son Robert in about 1932 (both appear on the 1940 census in Newton Heights), but I have not been able to find death, or burial records for either Mark Ward or his wife, Anna Rathbun Ward, or any other records for their children, who may well be alive and somewhere.
     I have tried the Fairfield family genealogy website and contacted a person who had some info about Mark on a Genforum site, without luck. I'm waiting to hear back from the Newton Historical Society and I have posted a comment on the page of a person who put Mark's passport photo up on Ancestry.com, but who doesn't have an email link.
     It's always ironic how much easier it can be to track down someone born two hundred years ago that someone born only eighty or so years past.