Document boxes were essential furniture in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century homes.  They not only served as storage for the family Bible, but as seen in contemporaneous inventories, they housed important documents, money, jewels, textiles, and cutlery.  The punched decoration on its façade directly relates to decoration present on  six-board chests made in Deerfield, Massachusetts. One chest in the collection of Historic New England (acc. no. 1991.1474) is marked IS 1699 was found in the Sheldon House attic. It may have been for John Sheldon (1658-1733) who built the "Old Indian House" in 1698 (see Nancy Carlisle, Cherished Possessions: A New England Legacy, (Boston, MA: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003), p. 105-7, no. 30).  Another chest in the collection of Historic Deerfield (acc. no. 84.003) is marked IM 1694 and may have been made for a member of the Munn or Mattoon families of Deerfield.  Another related document box, marked RS 1683, once belonged to the early collector William B. Goodwin of Hartford and is illustrated in Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, (New York: MacMillan Co., 1928), no. 127.  One possible maker could be John Hawks (1643-1721), a carpenter-joiner who lived in Deerfield from 1680 to around 1704.