Provenance, and Why it Matters

Provenance: Who owned something and how we know they owned it

Why is this important? Look at the coin above. It’s not been touched much—we know that because of how sharp the bevels are, how much relief there is in the hair and the other details of the coin, but you can see that thumbs have rubbed against Liberty’s hair. Given that the coin is minted in 1793, it could have been touched by any number of people—could have been held by Jefferson, or rolled around in Franklin’s pocket. It could have been hard earned money for a woman baking bread.

If we could establish that the coin actually sat on Ben Franklin’s desk, the coin would be worth more to many people than if it came from the apron pocket of our fictional baker, Elizabeth. So tracking who owned something often contributes to the worth of the object, and it often translates into more money, when the object is sold. (It’s worth a quick note that there are people who question attributing more value to something owned by a famous person than a regular person, but that’s another matter.)

Provenance also makes sure that we can do our best to say that something is what someone says it is.

Let’s go back to our fictional Elizabeth. Let’s say that she kept good books for her little bakery, and it began to grow—it’s on a busy corner in Philadelphia. Her husband dies, and so she and her daughters grow the business, each one handing the books to the other. Maybe they decide there’s a lucky day each year and they keep their profits for that day, handing those profits down one owner to another. Those profits and that day would be noted in the bakery’s books. If a few hundred years later, someone finds those coins in a breadbox, or maybe the family has always kept them and now wants to sell them, the books help establish the provenance—and the legitimacy of the coins.

Provenance then can protect an investment, it can confirm authenticity, and it can also tell us about the lives of people who handled coins and other objects.