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I bought these spoons as Canadian and the head hallmark could be Hendery with Wm W. White being a retailer. However, I see coin spoons being sold as made by Wm W. White, a silversmith in New York in the late 1800s. So, can anyone help as to the origin/date of these spoons and who/what was Wm W White? Thanks.
Hotlink to marks: http://b.imagehost.org/0157/925_001.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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This is by no means a positive attribution, but if the spoon were mine, William W White who was born in about 1800 in Virginia and worked mid nineteenth century in New York, New York as a jeweler and watchmaker would be at the top of my list for a likely retailer. He was at 68 Bowery from the late 1840's into the late 1850's and possibly beyond those years. He's old enough to have worked in the first quarter of the nineteenth century which is my guess for the date of your spoon. At this point I do not know where William worked other than New York.
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Actually, I do find specific Longworth New York City Directory mention of the jeweler William W White at 98(sp?) Bowery in 1828 and again at 68 Bowery in 1838. He's looking even better.
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Thanks for the help. I also did some research and indeed found Wm W. White as a NYC jeweler at 68 Bowery St in an 1852 directory. I also found a mention of the name being in Philadelphia from 1805-1806 and NYC from 1826-1850.
Now my question is about the marks. Are these so called pseudo marks or do they indicate something else ? I also have a G. Waterman spoon and it has similar marks, i.e. profile face, "date" letter but there is an eagle instead of a lion. Obviously, I know nothing about coin silver and usually avoid it because of my ignorance.
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About pseudo marks, from my own limited experience, there is no one right answer to your question, but here is an entry on this site that sums them up very well:
"Now my question is about the marks. Are these so called pseudo marks or do they indicate something else ?"
Yes, they appear to be American pseudo-hallmarks. I've taken the liberty of copying the responses to a similar inquiry a few years ago, FWIW.
From Trev (dognose): Pseudo marks are designed to look like official hallmarks, so yes they are fakes but it does not mean all pseudo marked items are below the standard they purport to be or that they are meant to deceive, although of course some are and do, many early colonial smiths copied marks from their mother countries because their new communities had yet to form a system of assaying, others like Chinese export silver were pseudo marked with English marks because they were making identical copies of the flatware down to the last detail to order.
From SilverSurfer: Hi! Just to help a bit (hopefully), American pseudo-hallmarks of the early nineteenth century, as yours seem to be, are "fakes" in that there was indeed no real hallmark system operative in America, save a unique system in Baltimore. So such pseudo-marks were generally made to loosely mimic the strict British system in order to represent quality, but the American marks have no consistent meaning as do each and every mark of the Brit system (sterling standard, date, town, duty paid), and the American marks were usually unique to each individual producer (some, such as the monarch's head, were used by many, but, unlike the Brit marks, the actual form varied with each producer, since they were concocted and applied by individual producers, and not by a central hall). That said, such American marks generally do indicate a piece of coin silver, nominally .900 fine, as compared to the contemporary Brit .925 sterling standard. This can be tricky, though, and for the neophyte collector, later silverplate marks might be confused with these coin silver pseudo-hallmarks.
