"Setouts" household assemblages following marriage.

      Deborah Rotman's posting on how the development of the cycle of a
family/household shapes the material culture world and impacts the
formation of archaeological assemblages raises some important questions.
There are many studies of household goods listed in probate inventories
that provide an insight into the accumulations of a lifetime.  Ann Smart
Martin and others have begun to extract family purchases from account books
to study patterns of ownership and changing life styles.  Barbara Carson's
book Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior and Patterns of Consumption in
Federal Washington is an excellent study of these activities for the
Nation's capital.  When I left Parks Canada twenty years ago, some of the
historians were studying "Donations" which was a listing of the goods to be
provided to widows in exchange for the transferring of ownership of their
estates to their children.  I am not sure if that material has been
published.  Perhaps some of our Canadian list members could provide some
information on that.

      While working on a couple of sites in the Ohio Western Reserve, I
found a number of published recollections of early settlers that listed the
"set out" of families when they got married.  Here is one as described by
Christian Cackler in his 1874 Recollections of an Old Settler.

      "On the first day of January, 1816, we moved to the place where I now
      live.  In moving, our furniture proved no inconvenience; my wife had
      a bed, I had an ax. I added to this, by purchasing of Zenas Kent,
      three white cups and saucers costing seventy-five cents, three knives
      and forks, and a wooden pail.  These were the first things I ever
      purchased.  The woman who lived with us gave three wooden plates, and
      a kettle to cook our victuals in.  My wife's father gave us a table,
      which completed our "setout."

Several other early settlers in the Western Reserve described their early
setouts.  These are described in "Ceramic Supply in an Economically
Isolated Frontier Community: Portage County of the Ohio Western Reserve,
1800-1825" by George L. Miller and Silas D. Hurry (Historical Archaeology
1983 vol. 17(2):80-92).  I have also seen listings of goods provided by
families their daughters, as they were about to be married in some accounts
held in the Downs Collection of the Winterthur Library.  I was wondering if
others have found descriptions of "setouts" in their research.  One of the
definitions of "setout" listed in Webster's Third New International
Dictionary (1971) is "Array, Display <complete ? of dinnerware and
glassware>."  Records of what a family has when they setup household seems
to be an area of potential research that could be an opportunity, however,
gathering the information on them would be tedious.  I would be interested
in hearing of other setouts that have been described.

Peace,
George L. Miller
URS Corporation
561 Cedar Lane
Florence, New Jersey 08518