Graduate student Melissa Woodson scanned the museum’s quilt inventory list, looking for a project for her textiles analysis class.

The quilts listed belong to the International Quilt Study Center (IQSC), attached to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, which has as its mission the collection, conservation, exhibition, and study of quilts. The University offers graduate degrees in textile history with an emphasis in quilt studies. And it was one of these classes that had Melissa reviewing IQSC’s inventory list, searching for an undocumented quilt to research.

The single-word notation on Quilt No. 1997.007.0852 jumped out at her: genealogy.

The quilt was a friendship quilt, its blocks covered with signatures of women long dead. Melissa was intrigued by the idea of using genealogy research to document an antique quilt. The names would guide her as Melissa uncovered the quilt’s history and origins. And since her father is an avid genealogist, Melissa thought he could help her if she got stuck. She chose the friendship quilt, beginning a journey that would trace a family through 150 years of history.

The quilt arrived with one solid clue to its beginnings. A handwritten note pinned to the quilt that read:

“This quilt was made by ladies of South Apalachin for Aunt Jane Blair, sister of Achsa Bancroft Moe, mother of Lucy Moe Wood, mother of Roy Wood.”

Despite the note, the quilt’s uniform design and careful block placement suggested a single seamstress rather than several.

Melissa began her research by analyzing the 100 cotton and woolen fabrics in the quilt. “We didn’t have a date on the quilt,” Melissa says. “From the fabric analysis I was able to pin the fabrics down to 1845–1865.” These dates were consistent with the friendship block pattern used in the quilt. The time bracket would be useful in tracing the names on the quilt, which in turn would tie down the quilt’s provenance.

Many of the quilt’s inked signatures were faded and unreadable. Melissa photographed the signatures using a Kodak 4800 digital camera (without flash, which could damage the delicate fabric). She then electronically manipulated the contrast and color of the images using Microsoft Photo Editor photo enhancement software until she could read every name on the quilt.

By printing the enhanced signature images on transparencies and overlaying them, Melissa compared the handwriting on the different blocks. She soon established that the handwriting on all the blocks was the same; one person, probably the seamstress, had signed all the names on the quilt.

Maps showed that South Apalachin, though no longer in existence, had been located in Tioga County in southeastern New York, right on the Pennsylvania border. “I called the county seat and contacted the historical society,” Melissa says. “I was also able to use Ancestry.com and the county’s historical site to go through cemetery records, census, newspapers, and indexes that had been posted on the Internet.”

She searched first for Jane Blair, Achsa Bancroft Moe, Lucy Wood, and Roy Wood. “I was able to match up the family name with the place name through Ancestry.com, and the dates matched up with the dates of the fabric.”

Melissa then searched the 1850 census page by page. She found Jane Bancroft, her sister Achsa Bancroft Moe, their sister, and their parents. She also found several other names familiar from the quilt. “Sometimes I found more than one person by the same name,” Melissa says. Maps helped her decide which name to pursue. “One of the ladies at the historical society sent me an 1865 plat map that plotted out who lived where. Once I established that this person lived two doors down from the quilt owners’ home, I was pretty sure I had the right family.”

Part of Melissa’s challenge was establishing whether the names on the quilt were maiden names or married names. But this challenge turned out to be more of a clue than a problem. “Once I found a young lady’s name in the record and established who her parents were, I was able to establish birth records and marriage records,” Melissa says. And by comparing the names on the quilt with the women’s marriage dates, Melissa was able to narrow the time frame of the quilt to the three year period of 1855–1858.

Melissa’s research assignment was due. She wrote up what she’d found and handed it in, but she still had a lot of unanswered questions. Her professor encouraged her to continue her research, but Melissa felt she’d found all she could from her Nebraska home. It was time to change directions.

“It took us two days to drive there,” Melissa says. When they finally arrived in Tioga County, the landscape surprised her. “I didn’t realize how mountainous the region was. It gave me a much better sense of the lives that these people would have lived.”

A GPS (Global Positioning System) and laptop computer helped Melissa pinpoint locations, with many adventures along the way. “We were traveling on a dirt road, which sometime you do when you’re following a GPS system, and looking for a cemetery. We couldn’t find it,” Melissa says. “Suddenly my father laughed and pointed above us to a mountainside with headstones sticking out of the snow.” They tramped uphill through the snow and found Bancroft family headstones as well as headstones for other names from the quilt. Melissa had checked the cemetery’s listings on the Internet, but these names were not included. She realized that Internet information is not always accurate or complete.

Melissa made many research discoveries during her visit. Between historical society records, cemetery trips, and visits to neighboring counties, she felt she had established the path of the Bancroft family. “But I didn’t have any particular leads on Jane Bancroft Blair herself,” Melissa says. “I knew that she was at that time thirty-five years old and still single, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.”

As Melissa and her father prepared to return home, Melissa’s father asked her if she had tried to trace the family forward to the present day. She hadn’t, but she thought it would be worth a try. “I knew where Lucy had gone with her family, and I traced her forward through probate records,” Melissa says. “I reached a point three generations down where the person was young enough to still be alive.” The records included a telephone number for the descendant, Cheryl Klingensmith. Melissa called the number. While Cheryl Klingensmith wasn’t home, her husband suggested Melissa speak with Cheryl’s aunt, Ethel Wood, who loved to talk about family history.

Melissa realized she was only a few blocks from Ethel Wood’s home. “I walked up to this small white house and rang the doorbell,” she recalls. “A tiny, little lady with curly, white hair came to the door. I told her who I was and what I was looking for, and she got a big smile on her face and said, ‘Come on in and tell me all about it!’ So my father and I sat in her dining room drinking coffee and eating homemade cookies while she told us about her family.”

Ethel Wood turned out to be a direct connection to the quilt and its handwritten note of origin. She is the eighty-eight-year-old widow of Leland Wood, who was the son of Roy Wood, the last name on the note.

Ethel told Melissa that several items remained from Roy Wood’s estate, including quilts, pictures, and a family Bible. She wasn’t sure what had happened to many of the things, but she thought the Bible was still around. She also suggested that Melissa contact her niece Cheryl again.

“As we headed back to Nebraska I had mixed emotions,” Melissa says. “I had gained a really good perspective on the history and culture of the area, and I had pinned down all the names on the quilt, but since she wasn’t in the census records, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t have more information about Jane Blair Bancroft. My ever-wise father told me to cheer up, because I’d found more than I thought I could. He said contacting the family always proved beneficial. And he didn’t know how right he was.”

Ethel’s daughter had visited her that day and they had talked about Melissa’s research. Her daughter was intrigued. The two began searching through things in Ethel’s home and found the old family Bible, complete with births, deaths, and marriages going back many years.

Ethel began reading the information to Melissa over the phone. “She started reading through names faster than I could write,” Melissa says. The records were of the elusive quilt recipient Jane Blair Bancroft, her parents, and her siblings through the next generation. The family Bible also contained labeled family photographs.

Ethel sent the Bible and photographs to UNL to be digitized, and eventually the family decided to donate the records to the center so they could be with the quilt.

According to the family Bible, Jane Blair Bancroft’s given name at birth was Mercy Jane Bancroft, born in 1825. The Bible listed Mercy Jane’s marriage to Addison Blair, a widower with a son, in 1863. “Mercy was thirty-eight years old when she got married; she was a spinster,” Melissa says. “With her husband’s name, I was able to go forward. I found they lived in Broward County, Pennsylvania, just across the New York border. Mercy joined Addison and his young son and his parents in their home in South Hill, Pennsylvania.”

The Broward County Historical Society referred Melissa to a local researcher, Norma Maryott. “Norma was very resourceful in finding data that wasn’t on the Internet,” Melissa says. “Norma remembered going to school with a lady that she thought was related to the Blairs. I called Ruth Smith and found out that she was the great-great-granddaughter of Addison Blair.” Ruth Smith became very interested in Melissa’s research. She told Melissa that the family farm and farmhouse still exist, but are not owned by the family any longer.

Perry soon went to the attic and returned with an egg crate. “You might as well have this,” he told Ruth. “It belongs to your family.” The crate was a genealogist’s dream come true, filled with family photographs and thirty-two diaries written by Mercy Jane Bancroft Blair. Ruth later donated the diaries to the archives to be with the family Bible and Mercy Jane’s friendship quilt.

The diaries were a treasure from the past. “Many have newspaper clippings, letters from family members, even hair clippings,” Melissa says. “Mercy wrote religiously every day.” From the diaries, Melissa learned that Mercy had been a traveling seamstress, moving from house to house as she did work for her clients. Mercy recorded details of her daily life, her religious observances, and her work as a seamstress, midwife, and nurse.

Mercy Jane also wrote of quilting, both for her clients and herself. A September 1863 entry reads, “Sister Moe helped me work on my quilt today and we finished it.” She also wrote of finishing the binding on the quilt just before her November 1863 marriage.

Melissa speculates that the quilt Mercy Jane completed just before her wedding is the very friendship quilt Melissa has been researching. Melissa suspects Mercy Jane made the quilt to help her remember old friends as she embarked on her married life. She set out to test her theory.

Melissa compared the handwriting in Mercy Jane’s diaries to the transparencies of the handwriting on the quilt blocks and found them to be the same. Mercy Jane signed the names on the quilt. Melissa also cross-referenced Mercy Jane’s recorded sewing jobs with fabric used in the quilt. She found, for example, an entry reading, “Worked for Mrs. Brown today on her brown polka dotted dress & received 25 cents for same.” The quilt contains a brown polka-dot block signed “Mrs. Elnina Brown.”

The quilt shows little signs of use. Mercy Jane likely kept it tucked away after her marriage as a remembrance of the friends of her former life.

And Melissa got an A grade on her research paper. “Given the resources, this is an exceptionally well-documented quilt now,” Melissa says. “There was this one little mystery that tugged on my heartstrings until it was solved. And it all started with one word on a piece of paper: genealogy.”

We all know the stories of the Underground Railroad, a clandestine organization that helped slaves escape north to freedom. One of the most interesting traditions surrounding the Underground Railroad has been the use of quilts hung from windows or clotheslines as signposts to escaping slaves.

The way these quilt signposts might have worked is not entirely clear. One tradition holds that log cabin quilts with a black block in the center indicated a safe house. Another version has quilts used as maps to freedom, with fields, streams, and landmarks depicted in fabric and thread. Yet another story suggests that specific quilt blocks gave specific directions, such as the drunken path block directing circuitous travel in an area.

Much uncertainty surrounds the Underground Railroad quilt tradition. The stories are difficult to document. No written record of the period mentions the use of quilts in this way. And no quilt from the period can be documented as used by the Underground Railroad.

In the 1999 book Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, authors Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard recount the family tradition of Ozella McDaniel Williams. Ozella Williams recited for the authors an oral tradition of the Underground Railroad meaning of specific quilt blocks—a tradition she said was passed down to her from her grandmother.

But the book is not without its critics. “The whole story has really captured people’s imaginations, but we are encouraging people to take it very critically,” says Carolyn Ducey, curator at the International Quilt Study Center.

One of the problems is that some of the quilt patterns referred to in the book did not exist at the time of the Underground Railroad. But Carolyn Ducey hopes the book may inspire further research and perhaps the discovery of a quilt that was actually used by the Underground Railroad.

Connie Myers writes freelance feature articles for American Patchwork & Quilting, Radio Digest, Brigham Young Magazine, Weissmann Travel Reports, and parenting publications. Her feature writing has led to several guest spots on radio talk shows. Connie enjoys writing about her interests, which include travel, cooking, family history, and quilting.

Return to the Ancestry Magazine May/June 2002 Table of Contents.