Watercolor Hobday Family record book Frederick County, Virginia, 1820-1825

Ink on paper with paperboard backing

Inscribed 3^rd page, ink: WILLIAM / HOBDAY Was Born / On ye 6th Day of January In the Year of our Lord 1780 / And was Married on ye 20th Day of March A.D. 1803 TO / CHRISTENA / WIDMEYER His Wife, / Who was Born on ye 5th Day of May In the year of our Lord 1775; 25th page: ELIZABETHI HOBDAY / Daughter of William Hobday and Christena his Wife / Was Born on the 6th Day of January / In the Year of our Lord 1819

Descended in family
Morgan Anderson, Frederick, Maryland, 1987

"Virginia Fraktur," Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1974

Weekley, Carolyn J., "Decorated Family Record Books from the Valley of Virginia," Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 7, no. I (May 1981): 5-7
Weiser, Frederick S., Fraktur: Pennsylvania German Folk Art, Ephrara, Pennsylvania; Science Press, 1973, pp. 68-69
American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 268, figs. 227A-B

Some minor stains and minor discoloration; conserved tears on extreme edges of pages.
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This small decorated booklet by an unidentified artist currently contains twenty-six pages, most of which are elaborately illustrated with decorative borders, fancy script and block lettering, flowers, birds, and other devices. On first examination, these little drawings appear to have been created by someone familiar with fraktur drawing and iconography. Closer study of these pages and more than sixteen other surviving books created by the same hand reveals that their cultural context was probably British and perhaps Scotch-Irish or Irish. The Hobdays and many of the other families who commissioned the little books were not of German heritage, and many of them were associated with Presbyterian churches. Most of the clients lived in Frederick County, Virginia, and Berkeley County, Virginia (now West Virginia). The Hobday family was from Frederick County.¹

The decorative devices used by the artist are easily recognizable and generally consistent in overall shape but shaded and detailed in many different ways. These include several types of flowers, especially large sunflowers and tulips and complex flower groups, trees, peacocks, various birds, butterflies, a highly detailed multistoried building (usually as a frontispiece), and single or double borders that terminate at the page corners in fleurs-de-lis. The latter and the scallop-edge curtains seen on the Hobday Family record book pages and throughout the other books are stylistically similar to the fraktur work of another unidentified Valley of Virginia scrivener known as the Stoney Creek Artist.

The Hobday book is a typical example of this artist's work and includes on its first decorated page an elaborate drawing of the Temple of Solomon with several cupolas and the symbolic Masonic elements in its doorway and central cupola and in the sky. This particular vignette is seen in a number of the books, suggesting that the fathers and heads of the households were Masons. The following pages list first the names and marriage date of the parents and then the births (and when appropriate, deaths) of their children. The page for Sarah Hobday, a deceased child, has a central black coffin that the artist traditionally used for departed loved ones. It is surrounded by the phrase "When this you see, remember me; Least I should forgotten be." The Hobday record book is also fully colored in shades of yellow, red, blue, green, and black inks. As such, it is one of the most colorful examples known by the artist. -C.J.W.

¹ Information derived from the author's files and Carolyn J. Weekley, "Decorated Family Record Books from the Valley of Virginia," Journal of Early Southern DecorativeArts 7, no. 1 (May 1981): 1-19.