Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About British Silver Hallmarks

I'm getting slightly closer to the bottom of the tub of salt dishes at the Rasey House now that the weather has cooled down and I can work without worrying about how long it will take the members of the DAR to find me after I pass out from heat exhaustion.

My stack of research material has increased as well.

It's growing!

The daughters of the woman who donated the collection, Irene S. Pollard, finally handed over Irene's own catalog of her collection. This lady owned a total of 2,584 salt dishes. So we don't even have 1/10th  of her original collection. Maybe we have 1/20th.

She had her own numbers and cataloging system, and some objects still have their assigned numbers attached, though the majority have fallen off.

The catalogs contain useful information like how much Irene originally paid for the salt dish, a brief description, and sometimes a page reference. Unfortunately I have no idea what book she was referencing, which is a bit frustrating! Sometimes she includes information about dates, styles, and materials that I didn't know, but for the most part her descriptions match mine. It is nice to have some evidence of provenance though!

I've also been learning a bit about silver hallmarks. Any sterling silver object that is to be sold commercially is stamped with a mark indicating the purity of the silver, and may include other marks such as what city it was from, the date, and the silversmith's maker's mark.

Here is an example

In the photo on the right the lion mark indicates that this object was made in Britain and is .925 pure sterling silver. The anchor mark means that it came from the city of Birmingham, and the B indicates the date. The date letters are A-Z, and they alternate upper and lower case, and different decades have different scripts. I'm pretty sure the B on this object means it is from 1825, but the seems a bit early to me, and it is very difficult to match up the tiny letters with the correct script on the chart.

Unfortunately the maker's mark on this object in indecipherable (they usually are), but knowing where it came from and having a general idea of what year is very rewarding. It's making discoveries like this that keep me interested in the salt dishes!