Re: Can anybody tell me anything about this ring?
Creskol wrote:
> The only marks I see is where it says STERLING as seen in the photographs.
> I am curious if it is indeed Civil War era, what kind of stone it might be, and any other information.
Creskol, I'm sure you already know most of the following information. I'm including it here for other readers, who may not already know the info.
The term "Sterling silver" refers to manufactured silver objects which contain no less than 92.5% silver. From approximately the 13th-century until well-into the 20th-century, European (especially British, French, and German) silver-manufacturers applied a hallmark-symbol (or occasionally, a set of three numbers) to denote the percentage of silver in the object. In America, the European system (using hallmark-symbols, or numbers) was followed until 1868, when American silversmiths first adopted a Standard-of-Purity for sterling silver, to distinguish it from Coin-Silver, which is only 90%-pure silver (or less).
The earliest occurrence of stamping the spelled-out word "sterling" (instead of a hallmark symbol, or numbers) onto silver objects seems to have happened in the 1870s, and seems to have been begun by American silversmiths shortly after the 1868 adoption of an American standard for the content of Sterling silver. That info comes from extensive websearching, and in particular the Wikipedia article on Sterling Silver hallmarks, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_hallmarks
Scroll down to the section on United States hallmarks, where the artilcle says "After the adoption of the sterling standard, pieces were marked with "STERLING", the number "925" or the notation "925/1000".
If correct, the information indicates a silver object (like Creskol's ring) dates from no earlier than 1868/early-1870s. Despite extensive websearching, I've been unable to find any silver objects stamped "Sterling" whose time-period is CONFIRMED to be pre-1870. (Do not trust the claims of sellers on Ebay.)
All of that having been said... I don't believe I know everything there is to know. If somebody here has (or can find) SOLID PROOF that the information is incorrect, please do post it here, so we can all learn something new about dating silver objects which are stamped "Sterling."
