Family Heirloom

We enjoy watching Antique Roadshow on PBS. I especially like the so-called family heirlooms and the accompanying stories passed down through the generations that link the items to ancestors and history; stories about how an item was given to a relative by an important person in history, or stories about an item being a cultural artifact many centuries old. We have one of those family items. A well worn blue printed china plate passed down through my mother's side of the family. The claim is that the plate was the last remaining piece from a set of china brought to the New World from England by a relative on one of the ships that immediately followed the Mayflower. The plate is marked on the back with “Lake.”

On a recent trip to Williamsburg, VA, Sue and I took a behind the scenes tour of the Ceramics Department at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, which has one of the largest collections of British ceramics outside England. From Sue’s description, but without seeing the plate, and after checking a couple of books, a curator questioned whether the plate was from the early 1600s and suggested it was probably Staffordshire Transferware from that region of England made in the first half of the 19th C. A few weeks later I found the same plate on eBay labelled Staffordshire Transferware made in the 1820s.

If we were in an Antiques Roadshow type feedback booth, we might say: “We found out that our antique plate was not 400 years old and the family story about its origin was far from accurate. Still, the plate is 200 years old, made in the Staffordshire region of England, and worth $10-$20. We had a great time. Thank you DeWitt Wallace Museum and eBay.” (Cue the theme music....)