An 18-year-old man from Philadelphia, off on a business trip for his first employer, drowns when his ship sinks more than 170 years ago. How does his community ensure he's not forgotten? They create a quilt, of course.
In 1846, the women of his family's church each contributed blocks to create the quilt. Within it, there's a square depicting a sea voyage and a tender phrase that references the young man. Nearby squares are dedicated to other children in the family who also died young.
That's one example of social and cultural history that can be divined from a quilt, explained Carolyn Ducey, Curator of Collections at the International Quilt Study Center Museum, University of Nebraska, during the Department of Human Ecology's annual Empey Lecture. She delivered it on March 11, as part of the ALES Centennial Lecture Series.
Quilt scholarship can uncover even more profound facts that might otherwise be lost after relatively few decades. Ducey demonstrated this to more than 100 people from ALES and the public while explaining her research on chintz appliqué album quilts made by the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia in the late 1840s.
In the chintz appliqué technique, women cut flowers, wreaths or other designs printed on chintz fabric imported from England, to create individual blocks that were then stitched onto a white background. Album quilts always contained signatures on each block, and often dates, locations, poems or sentimental messages.
"It was a time of a lot of change in society," Ducey said. "People were moving west and when they did, it might be the last time you ever saw them. So signatures were very important."
Ducey created a database of 300 such quilts and detected names that kept cropping up. She narrowed her research to these names and to the First Baptist Church. Then she plunged into the next step of material culture research: finding supplemental information from published sources such as church records, meeting minutes, letters and other documents.
Starting with a quilt made for an Ann Rhees, she determined that while some of the quilts were meant to honour a person, such as Rhees who started the first Sunday school in the United States, others were commissioned for families. However, records of missionary visits and other notes proved that many quilts were fundraisers for missionaries in Burma. For a fee, you could have your name on a block.
While it's been known that women's sewing helped support soldiers during the American Civil War of the 1860s, and that they also raised funds to rebuild cities after the war, this discovery was startling.
"My research has shown that this fundraising effort by women began much earlier than we thought, as early as the 1840s," said Ducey.
In 1846, the women of his family's church each contributed blocks to create the quilt. Within it, there's a square depicting a sea voyage and a tender phrase that references the young man. Nearby squares are dedicated to other children in the family who also died young.
That's one example of social and cultural history that can be divined from a quilt, explained Carolyn Ducey, Curator of Collections at the International Quilt Study Center Museum, University of Nebraska, during the Department of Human Ecology's annual Empey Lecture. She delivered it on March 11, as part of the ALES Centennial Lecture Series.
Quilt scholarship can uncover even more profound facts that might otherwise be lost after relatively few decades. Ducey demonstrated this to more than 100 people from ALES and the public while explaining her research on chintz appliqué album quilts made by the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia in the late 1840s.
In the chintz appliqué technique, women cut flowers, wreaths or other designs printed on chintz fabric imported from England, to create individual blocks that were then stitched onto a white background. Album quilts always contained signatures on each block, and often dates, locations, poems or sentimental messages.
"It was a time of a lot of change in society," Ducey said. "People were moving west and when they did, it might be the last time you ever saw them. So signatures were very important."
Ducey created a database of 300 such quilts and detected names that kept cropping up. She narrowed her research to these names and to the First Baptist Church. Then she plunged into the next step of material culture research: finding supplemental information from published sources such as church records, meeting minutes, letters and other documents.
Starting with a quilt made for an Ann Rhees, she determined that while some of the quilts were meant to honour a person, such as Rhees who started the first Sunday school in the United States, others were commissioned for families. However, records of missionary visits and other notes proved that many quilts were fundraisers for missionaries in Burma. For a fee, you could have your name on a block.
While it's been known that women's sewing helped support soldiers during the American Civil War of the 1860s, and that they also raised funds to rebuild cities after the war, this discovery was startling.
"My research has shown that this fundraising effort by women began much earlier than we thought, as early as the 1840s," said Ducey.