Labor of Love

As the Free-Range Historian, I often undertake projects on behalf of a non-profit, a small business, or a private collection. This work always takes me down an exciting rabbit hole, encountering an area of the past that I may not yet have studied or appreciated.

But some projects come from my very own family, objects and images close to my heart and part of the fiber of my family’s life. Physical reminders of family history, passed from grandmother to granddaughter. Items of material culture that shape the aesthetics of my childhood memories yet are also part of their larger historical context. Pieces of the past.

One such labor of love is my grandmother’s quilt collection. Stitched into the dozens of quilts both large and small in her keeping are the efforts, tastes, and skills of many of the women in our family. Each speaks for itself in its colors, composition, and finery. And each reminds us of the woman who created it, working long hours to hand-piece and hand-quilt a beautiful bed covering for herself, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. My goal is to catalog them all by pattern name, creator, year of creation, and any fun stories associated with the quilt or the quilter. Then I will rehouse the oldest of the collection, like the large red and white Drunkard’s Path, creased and stained from many years of use but still enjoyable for future generations with a bit of attention (and some archival tissue paper supports for those poor fold lines!).

Each of us have family stories to tell, legends to pass on. By caring for the objects associated with those tales and heroes, we can continue to hand them down. I look forward to telling my kids about the “Tornado Quilt,” infamous as a physical reminder of a devastating storm that ripped through Sharon, Pennsylvania, in the 1940s. The quilt was laid out in the attic of my great-grandmother’s home, but when the roof was torn off the house, much of the fabric was scattered. She and her mother survived the onslaught, holding tightly to each other in an interior room while the windows were blown out all around them. She was later able to recover the quilt and find new fabric to finish her work–a shift in the yellows toward the quilt’s edge is the only evidence of the traumatic event.

What family stories do you hold close to your heart? What objects can you better care for to pass down to the next generation?