Genealogy

Flax seeds, Londonderry Linen sample with overshot weave pattern, explanatory note, hand-colored ferrotype photograph.

This photograph is of my grandmother's great-great-grandmother, Sarah Stuart (McCauley) Weston, born in 1787 in Merrimac, New Hampshire. The photo dates from the early 1850's, shortly before her death.

Sarah Stuart Weston's great-grandparents came to America in about 1720 from Ulster in the north of Ireland. They settled in Londonderry, New Hampshire – a newly established town named after their home in Ireland – and made their living in part by the cultivation and processing of flax into linen, a trade the Scots-Irish had successfully developed in Ireland.

The note about the linen sample, which dates from 1804, was written by my grandmother, Dorothy (Bowen) Sisson, in about 1920 and reads as follows:

A specimen of my great-great-grandmother
Weston's table linen spun and woven when she
was eighteen years old, four years before she
was married. We do not think any of her children
have shown as much skill as she. The marking
which is a fac-simile shows that it is more
than a hundred years old. D.B.