Upon helping a researcher based in Shelter Island, New York, last month, I had to peruse the Institute Archives’ expansive Horsford collection, which I hadn’t done before. Among fun items, such as colonial currency dated to 1775, an 1839 newspaper story of a young girl becoming a pirate, and a lady throwing a summer party in the Roaring Twenties, where attendees had to dress up as Colonial Quakers, something else caught my eye: wax seals.