What Your Kitchen Furniture Says About You

During my MA course, one theory I found most interesting was that of material culture, which involves studying and analysing objects, especially when no written or oral sources are available. My grandparents have left very few written records, for example, and my great-grandparents fewer still. I analysed a piece of furniture within a short essay and am sharing my thoughts on it here as you may have similar pieces of furniture around that hold no monetary value and you're holding onto them for sentimental reasons. But when you think about it, they are pieces of history that reveal much about their previous owners, perhaps your ancestors. 

The furniture in question is an old, tall kitchen dresser, crudely made, there's nothing particularly fine in the workmanship. My great grandfather Joseph Sixsmith made it for his bride Malahath, and the rounded edge on the left side shows how the right side was fitted against a fireplace wall. The upper half has three shelves and the lower only has one shelf dividing it. If it is the case that Joseph made it for Malahath when they were first married, then it would have travelled to at least four houses. From a small farm in Doonane (three miles from our current home farm) to a grander house and farm in Kilmeany (outside Carlow) but times were tough and the banks foreclosed on them. The 1926 census shows them to be living in Shangarry, probably on a rented farm, before they bought a farm in Ballybromhill near Fenagh. In 1946, the Sixsmith family moved to Garrendenny when they inherited this farm from an uncle. 

Family stories report that there was a long-standing argument about a kitchen dresser, that Joseph wanted one of his daughters to have a particular dresser but his son George and daughter-in-law Lily said no. Was it this kitchen cupboard? I do not know. 

In 1972, my parents built a modern house, moving out of Garrendenny Castle, which fell into dereliction. They sold some of the old furnishings or gave them to anyone who expressed an interest in them; indeed, I once met a man who said he had the large mirror that was once above the mantelpiece in the sitting room. This cupboard was one item that stayed. My parents thought this cupboard was useful for storing veterinary medicines and small farm implements. They relocated it to an old coach house, and it stayed there for nearly fifty years. 

I eventually got around to doing something with it. Cleaned it, sanded it, treated it for woodworm, put a new base in it as the old base was rotten, painted it, and it now sits in my kitchen. I detest small cupboards, and while modern kitchen pantries are nice, they're just too modern for me.  And to be honest, not quite big enough. I like I can open a cupboard door and before me are all my plates and bowls, glasses, rarely used crockery to the top and rear, and all my baking ingredients. It's often a todderly mess, but that's what I like about it - there's lots of room to be todderly. 

Indeed, I have a second old cupboard too, one that holds the rest of my food ingredients, from tall items on the bottom to a biscuit shelf and a tins shelf and everything else. But I bought this one at an auction about thirty years ago, so it doesn't hold any family history. 

My old kitchen cupboard doesn't hold any monetary value yet it shows how my great grandfather had enough skill to build it and not enough money to buy one, that my grandparents also viewed it as a useful and essential piece of furniture, and if it was that contested dresser, were not willing to let it go to a sibling. My parents, preferring a modern kitchen, didn't move it to their new home but viewed it as still useful enough to keep. Perhaps my father had some sentimental connection to it.

And what does it say about me? Probably that I have more fondness for old battered pieces of furniture than antiques that are almost perfectly preserved; that I don't have a problem for cupboard doors being left open (they are often half open); I like big cupboards where everything can find its own place in a todderly arrangement. This cupboard has many scars from a long life but then, so do I. :) 

And yes, if only this cupboard to talk, what stories it could tell. But it does tell us a little bit about the past.