When she stitched this family register sampler at the age of nine, Eliza Ann Hunt had lost both her mother and her step-mother. She commemorates her father’s two marriages within three interlaced hearts: the first contains his name and birth date, the second encloses the names and birth dates of his two wives, and the...

Polly Turner’s sampler, worked in 1786, is one of the earliest known examples made at Mary Balch’s school in Providence, Rhode Island. According to tradition, the sampler’s five-bay house represents the residence of the president of Rhode Island College. Polly’s is the first known needlework depiction of the house, which appears on at least six...

The unstructured nature of this family register sampler, initialed “SS” and attributed to Sally Sacket (b. 1786), is typical of eighteenth-century examples. In contrast to the more organized genealogy samplers that appear after 1800, the text here is run together in continuous lines. Sally’s sampler is one of a group of three Westfield, Massachusetts, examples...

Family register samplers, like this example by Sarah A. Chalker, were a way of documenting and preserving family histories. They were frequently worked by schoolgirls as part of the later phase of their needlework education. The information in this sampler is organized in rows and framed by a scrolled arch and classical columns, revealing a...