If you’ve ever wondered about the color of the uniform worn by your ancestor pre-color photography or how to save the textiles in your family collection, then you’ll love this episode about textile conservation with historic clothing expert Maria Vasquez.
A few years ago, I gave a presentation at The Varnum Armory a medieval-style building in East Greenwich Rhode Island. After the talk, members took me behind the scenes. Built in 1913, it is the headquarters for Varnum’s Regiment, a chartered unit of the RI colonial militia. Flags, banners, uniforms, artifacts, and weaponry in the collection date from the colonial period through the twentieth century. Since I’ve worked on the Last Muster series of books of images of individuals who lived during the American Revolution and into the age of photography, seeing all those collections preserved was fascinating. Later I learned that there was a conservator working on the textile collections and I had to meet her. Well…Covid intervened but we did manage to chat via Zoom.
By the way, one of the items she’s worked on is now known as the oldest colonial American flag in existence.
Related Episodes:
Episode 127: Beautiful but Deadly: Toxic Fashion and Criminal Dress with Dr. Alison Matthews David
Episode 88: Ancestral Tours of Battlefields and Bonefields
Links:
- Royal Conservation and Exhibition
- Oldest Colonial Flag in America
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About My Guest:
Maria Vasquez is a textile conservator with a Masters’s Degree in Textile Conservation and sixteen years of sewing and patterning experience, including two Master Seamstress Certificates. She owns her business, Royal Conservation and Exhibition, where she does contract conservation and stabilization work for exhibitions of museums and private collectors. Currently, she is also volunteering at the Varnum Memorial Armory in East Greenwich, Rhode Island in exchange for lab space in one of their back rooms. This allows her to have a secure and climate-controlled workroom to mount and stabilize objects for the Varnum museum, but also do her own contract work.
About Maureen Taylor:
Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada. She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira). She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com