Antiques Roadshow

GUEST

The lady that made it was my great, great grand-aunt.

APPRAISER

Okay. And the great thing about it is, too, it tells where she was living at the time that she did it. If you look right across the top here, it says, right next to her name, Newtown, Connecticut. And the other thing that she talks about over here is when her father and mother were married in the 1820s. And this has her birth date.

GUEST

1822.

APPRAISER

1822, yeah, and then it's got a couple of other siblings there.

GUEST

Two more sisters.

APPRAISER

Right. Unfortunately, her father died at the age of, what? 38.

GUEST

Yeah.

APPRAISER

Well, let's talk about what this is, and the overall concept of how people look at these things. This is a schoolgirl sampler. Back in the 18th, and even up through the mid-19th century, there were schools that taught young girls how to do this. And if you were a dutiful young lady in your family, you would go to school, and you could, by doing this and proving that you could do this real complicated needlework, you were basically proving that you had the discipline to become a good wife. Which is kind of ironic. Not exactly a new-millennium approach to womanhood.

GUEST

Right.

APPRAISER

But that's the way it was back then. The other thing that's really cool about this, that I love, is the fact that it has the great strawberry border, has wonderful decorative elements-- you know, houses, got Adam and Eve over here. She was using silk thread on linen. In my opinion, she left this area up here blank originally, to do family history things. There's a word in the trade we use called a "keeper." In other words, if you could get this, you would keep it, because it's such a good thing. It's not glued down. That was the one thing I was concerned about. Lots of times they glue these down to a board, and it's still floating. And we had a discussion at the folk art table after you were, uh, gone over to the green room to wait for us to go on TV. We felt like... that its value is around $30,000 or $40,000.

GUEST

$30,000 or $40,000?

APPRAISER

Yeah, yeah.

GUEST

You're kidding.

APPRAISER

Pretty good surprise for the day, huh?

GUEST

I should have it insured.

APPRAISER

Yeah, you might want to do that.