Stitching Personal and National Memory in the Early Republic

When Julia Ann Fitch of Massachusetts stitched her family history sampler in 1806, she adapted the conventional format to include national milestones alongside the personal and familial. Julia Ann recorded in thread the formation of her family (the birth and marriage of her parents), her own birth, and the entry and exit into the world of her siblings. More unusually, she also included the birth of her nation—July 1776—and the birth and death of its first leader, George Washington. The two national milestones frame Julia Ann’s own signature, which identified the name, date, and location of the samplermaker. With this sampler, Julia Ann incorporated America into the history of her family and also reciprocally herself and her family into the history of the new nation. Moreover, the embroidered image around which the family history clusters features four female figures, placing women at the center of both the family and fledgling America and grafting them into the broader genealogy of independence. This paper explores how young women like Julia Ann navigated the intimate and international upheavals of the eighteenth century through their needlework and, in particular, how they fashioned identities, curated legacies, and marshaled memory to both imagine a new nation and assert their places in it.