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.