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Caroline Lamb, Family Record, Phillipston, Massachusetts, 18172Family record samplers served a purpose not unlike inscriptions in the family bible; they recorded and preserved important information regarding the cohesive family unit, which had taken on a heightened importance in the early years of the new republic. An important exhibition of these samplers, presented in 1989 at the DAR Museum in Washington, DC, documented the origin and great variety of this form. Curator Gloria Seaman Allen, in the accompanying catalogue, states that the family record sampler was, most certainly, an American invention.We were pleased to have acquired Caroline Lamb%u2019s large, praiseworthy family record sampler which was made in 1817 in Phillipston, Massachusetts, 30 miles northwest of Worcester. This sampler is almost identical in composition to the sampler made by Dorothy Knight, also in 1817 and in Phillipston, in the collection of Old Sturbridge Village Museum. The Knight sampler was exhibited at the DAR Museum and is published as figure 64 in Family Record: Genealogical Watercolors and Needlework by Gloria Seaman Allen. Caroline and Dorothy certainly worked side-by-side as their samplers are dated only one month apart. Both samplers record the names, births and deaths of family members but also present an outstanding, well-developed pictorial scene of the same large Federal house with a smaller dependency building and smoke coming from all three chimneys, the same trees, identical columns, swags at top and large blossom side borders, all accomplished in lustrous silk on gauze-like linen. Caroline Lamb began the narrative on her sampler by stitching the names and birth dates of her parents, Mr. Joshua Lamb and Miss Martha Cole, then stating, %u201cthey were Married at Gerry 1803.%u201d In her inscription along the bottom of the sampler the town name of Phillipston is clearly stated, so we initially thought that the family must have removed from Gerry to Phillipston. In fact, the town of Gerry, which was named for Elbridge Gerry, signer of the Declaration of Independence, vicepresident of the United States under James Madison and later governor of Massachusetts, changed its name to Phillipston in 1812, because citizens objected to Gerry%u2019s redistricting of geographic boundaries for the purpose of political advantage, a practice that was named for him and came to be known as gerrymandering. (continued on the next page)