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Antiques

Album Might Have a Presidential Tie

Ian Brabner, an Americana dealer in Delaware, is bringing an 1870s photo album that he says has a presidential connection to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, opening Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory. Last year at a Maryland estate auction, Mr. Brabner said, he unwittingly bought images of maternal ancestors of Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama’s mother, in Kansas and Ohio.

The brown leather book, with gold-colored clasps, contains 35 pictures. Handwritten inscriptions mention the Wolfley, Preston, Jager and Abbott families. Mr. Brabner said a few people were clearly labeled, including Anna Wolfley, the president’s great-great-great aunt, and Elmer Preston, a distant Obama cousin.

“Future scholarship or facial recognition technology may identify further kinship ties to Mr. Obama from many of the album’s photographs,” Mr. Brabner wrote in a label for the book fair.

The auction house had described the artifact as a run-of-the-mill 19th-century lot. Mr. Brabner said his Web and library searches revealed the genealogical connections.

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A picture of Anna Wolfley, from an 1870s album of photos that its seller, Ian Brabner, says are of ancestors of President Obama’s mother.Credit...Ian Brabner, Bookseller

The album is now priced at $45,000. (Mr. Brabner has not disclosed his purchase price.)

Christopher Challender Child, a specialist in Obama family research at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, said Mr. Brabner’s research agreed with findings over the years and the album discovery was newsworthy. He added that Anna Wolfley’s resemblance to President Obama was “really uncanny.”

A White House spokesman declined to comment on the album.

A FREED SLAVE’S DESIGNS

No one knows what Willie Howard, a freed slave in Mississippi, meant to convey with his appliqués on wooden furniture. His only known works, two 1870s desks, are wrapped in silhouettes of weapons, snakes, bottles, woodworking and blacksmithing tools, and farm and kitchen implements.

Scholars have speculated that he was chronicling his traumatic prewar experiences while exulting in his newfound creative freedom. “It’s literally being able to do whatever he wants to do, and still incorporating that memory of plantation life,” said Alyce Perry Englund, an associate curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford.

In January the two desks appeared at New York antiques fairs. The Wadsworth bought one from the Ricco/Maresca Gallery at the Metro Show, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts bought the other from the antiques dealer Jeffrey Tillou at the Winter Antiques Show. The museums did not disclose the amounts paid, but Maine Antique Digest reported the asking prices as $300,000 (Ricco/Maresca) and $400,000 (Tillou).

The dealers did not plan for the simultaneous offerings of the desks, which a Mississippi dealer had found decades ago. “Talk about incredibly bizarre coincidence,” said Frank Maresca. Mr. Tillou said, “We both maybe helped sell the other one.”

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An 1870s writing desk by Willie Howard, a freed slave in Mississippi, is now at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.Credit...Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Recent research suggests that Howard was born in Africa, though how old he was when captured or when he arrived in America are not known. What is clearly recorded is that he worked alongside about 200 other slaves at Kirkwood, a plantation near Jackson. Catherine McWillie, his last owner, wrote after the Civil War that she hoped Howard and his family would choose to spend “a long and useful life” at Kirkwood. By the early 1900s the McWillies had razed their 1840s Greek Revival house; their cemetery survives in the woods there.

The Wadsworth desk is rather masculine, with a dark crusty finish and broad overhanging drawers, while the Minneapolis desk has a honey tone and a top band of almost delicate dentils. The interiors of both were cobbled together from old crates, with occasional markings for Northern cotton mills and Southern tobacco packagers. “You were making do with what you had, in a really difficult economic climate,” said Corine Wegener, an associate curator at the Minneapolis Institute.

Howard’s works will go on view in the next few weeks. Curators in various departments at the two museums have been vying to show the versatile desks, which are compatible with quilts, slave shackles, African statues, outsider art, Louise Nevelson sculpture and Fornasetti mid-20th-century collaged screens.

DEAR GENERAL...

The Minneapolis philanthropist Allyn Kellogg Ford made his early-20th-century fortune on clothes whiteners and spent part of it buying military correspondence. He collected letters of Revolutionary War leaders, especially 1781 missives written to Brig. Gen. George Weedon explaining how American troops were strategizing at Yorktown, Va.

“We shall soon know whether the whole is a farce,” George Washington’s aide-de-camp Jonathan Trumbull skeptically wrote to Weedon, when Cornwallis offered to surrender.

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A document, signed by John Hancock in June, 1776, gave George Weedon the rank of colonel in the army.Credit...Swann Galleries

A preview for a sale of the letters opens Saturday at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan, with estimates mostly of a few thousand dollars a page. Weedon’s descendants had kept the material together. Ford acquired it in 1927 and his family later donated it to the Minnesota Historical Society, which has consigned it to Swann.

In a statement released through Swann, the society wrote that the sale will help it better fulfill its mission “of chronicling Minnesota’s history through a wide range of artifacts and materials,” and the profits will be used to acquire “new historical items that preserve and tell the story of Minnesota’s past.”

Historical societies are cash strapped nationwide. But breaking up a cohesive scholarly gift like the Weedon papers remains unusual. “You don’t see these kinds of large collections getting sold very frequently,” said E. Lee Shepard, the vice president for collections at the Virginia Historical Society. He added that he would “never second-guess another institution” for choosing what to disperse, and that the Weedon papers fortunately have been documented and published.

The Swann sale also includes Ford’s letters documenting turning points in later American wars. An 1847 letter from Zachary Taylor ($10,000 to $15,000) reports on casualties for both sides in the Mexican-American War, “enough so on ours to cover the whole country with mourning.”

In an 1865 letter ($4,000 to $6,000) Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman wrote from South Carolina about troops gearing up to “get the railroad broken.” Freed slaves were eager to help fight, and Sherman shrewdly suggested that anyone opposing “the policy of arming Negroes” should be asked to file grievances with the secretary of war’s office.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 30 of the New York edition with the headline: Album Might Have a Presidential Tie. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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