Category: Identity Family

Quilted Petticoat Panel, about 1750

This petticoat’s designs (trellis design, border above pictorial elements, and motifs) connect it to over twenty others made in Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut. The ship, fish, and mermaid motifs connect it to the maritime trade, backbone of Rhode Island economy; one of the petticoats’ makers was the daughter of a sea captain. 

Many eighteenth-century quilted petticoats were professionally made in commercial workshops in England and France. However, they were also made individually in America, sometimes under the tutelage of needlework teachers, as appears to be the case with this group of regional designs. 

Silk face, wool backing and filling. Gift of Elizabeth Ogden Weber 3622

Connecting Threads: See a panel from another of these petticoats, made into a quilt, in the Study Gallery quilt racks!

Album Quilt, 1847

As a project completed by members of a family and displaying design typical of Quaker quilts of southern New Jersey, this quilt speaks to three forms of identity: familial, regional, and religious.Names of the siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles of Edith Sykes of Burlington County, New Jersey, members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), appear on this quilt along with dates shortly before her 1847 marriage.

Cotton. Gift of Dorothy Truitt in honor of Margie Cockrel Lovett  94.23 

Family record, 1822-28

Family records celebrated the immediate family of their maker, and sometimes honored those who had died. Six years after Sarah Stevens recorded finishing her work, she added her mother’s death in a different thread which has since faded, emphasizing its later addition. 

Sarah Stevens, Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Silk thread on linen ground. Gift of Sarah E. Caldwell  55.111

Connecting Threads: See the family record in the Grief and Remembrance section.