The Cleveland Museum of Art has a sampler embroidered in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands, in 1778. It’s silk on linen, about thirty-two centimetres by forty-six. The museum’s record has no description. The inscription field reads, in full: “rows of alphabet and numerals; below: ‘T S I W/ 1778.’”

That’s accurate. Most of the cloth is alphabets, eight of them by my count, in green, blue, gold, rose and brown. Some are small and plain. One is big and blocky and takes two rows. One has every letter framed in little loops and dots. After one of the small alphabets come the numbers one to ten. At the bottom there’s a band of pictures: a cross standing on steps, a tree, a ship with a flag, and what looks like an eagle with two heads. In among them are the initials T S and I W, and the date, split across the foot of the tree: 17 on the left, 78 on the right.

The Dutch word is merklap, a marking cloth. A girl made one while she learned to sew, and the letters weren’t for writing sentences. They were for marking: initials, and sometimes numbers, stitched into the corners of sheets, shirts and napkins, so a household knew whose linen it was. The alphabets are a set of letters she could use for that later.

None of the eight has a J or a U. That’s normal for the time. I did the work of both I and J, and V did the work of both U and V, so “I W” could just as well be someone we’d write J W. What I didn’t expect is that none of them has a Q either. I went along every row. Each one goes O, P, R. I couldn’t find anyone who explains it for Dutch samplers, so this is my guess and not a fact: she was learning letters to put on linen, and hardly anyone in Friesland needed to mark a pillowcase with a Q.

She also ran out of room more than once. The second alphabet in the top row gets as far as R and meets the edge of the cloth. The one with the loops, the fanciest, stops at L, and a flowerpot and a small heart fill the rest of its line. A few letters near the top have faded almost into the linen, and there’s a brown stain at the upper right. It looks like a practice piece that somebody kept.

Somebody kept it for a long time. The museum lists its owner before the museum as Mary Pack McNairy of Cleveland, who died in 1939. Her two daughters gave it to the museum, and it was accessioned in 1942. That’s the whole provenance. It doesn’t say how a girl’s marking cloth got from Friesland to Ohio, or who either pair of initials belonged to. Samplers usually carry their maker’s initials, so one pair is probably hers.

She was learning to mark linen with her initials, so a sheet or a napkin would be known as hers. Almost two and a half centuries later, the initials at the foot of the cloth are all that’s left to say who it belonged to.