An Unfinished Story

Dear Diary,

One of the family artifacts I inherited from my maternal grandfather's side is this embroidered handkerchief. It is quite large, over 12 inches square, and it was never finished. Yellowed and stained with age, it is over 150 years old, to me it is an unfinished story. The fabric is very thin and finely woven so I am thinking it was a wedding handkerchief, a part of a trousseau perhaps.

I had to photograph it in parts so the detail could be seen. It is still attached to the paper pattern, drawn in brown ink on the back of paper that has tiny German text printed on it. It is from a branch of the family named, and try not to giggle, Tinklepaugh. As in "tinkle-paw"! ( It would make a wonderful name for a cat I've always thought!)

This "stitch in time" is an amazing work of unfinished art...delicately embroidered with thread as fine as a hair and an impossibly tiny needle, which is still there. The artist must have used very small, sharp scissors to carefully cut away the finished work. It must have taken hundreds of hours, laboring by an oil lamp. My eyes ache just thinking about it.

There was an Eliza M. TInklepaugh that lived with my great-great grandfather and mother. She was 41 in the 1850 census. Was she the one who started the handkerchief? A mystery but then so much of our ancestor's story will never be told because they took the stories with them when they died.

There is an African proverb: "When an old man dies, a library burns down." We loose so many stories. My genealogy project is my attempt to tell some of them.