posted 02-14-2006 01:19 PM            

Hey...I'm new to this,so here goes. I have a straw spoon that has what looks like to me to be a crest on the flat part of the bowl of the spoon. Inside the crest it has 800, underneath that number is MM. Can someone tell me what this is and what it means, please? Thanks so much!

posted 02-14-2006 01:47 PM            

A tentative answer to your question: 800 indicates that your piece is solid silver (as opposed to silver plate) that is 80%pure
(800 means 800 parts per thousand pure silver). The mark is hard to interpret without a photo, but it may be the post 1888 German mark, which was the crescent moon, a crown, and the silver purity mark. See if you can find a crown. The "MM" would probably be the makers initials. We need photos to be sure.

posted 02-15-2006 10:23 AM            

Photos of both the overall spoon and a closeup of the markings really are so important for us to be able to tell you much about your spoon. While we can't guarantee we will be be to identify it since there is still much not known or recorded about many silver markings around the world, without the photos the most we can do is guess. If your camera does not take closeup photos, perhaps a family member or friend has one that can do this? Most modern digital cameras have a setting called a macro function which enables the camera to take clear closeups. If no one you know has a camera that can do this, a trick you can do with an old style camera is to use a large magnifying glass, holding it up to the spoon as if you were going to use it to see the details and then taking the photo through the magnifying lens. This takes some practice but you can just delete the unsuccessful attempts until you get the hang of it.

Another bit of information that could be helpful is whether your mother used to live in another country or whether she was a world traveler. This can help us pin down possible origins of her things.

To add a bit more to Tom's information, 800 silver is of a lower standard than Sterling which is 925 parts per thousand pure silver. You have to add at least 50 to 75 parts copper and nickle to silver to create an alloy that is strong enough to withstand use. If you were to make a spoon out of absolutely pure, 1000 parts out of 1000 parts, silver, it would be so soft that it would bend and deform with little pressure.

posted 02-15-2006 04:45 PM            

If you can e-mail your photos, you can also post them. Go photobucket.com, set up a free account, and then upload them to the photo album photobuckets lets you create. Once the image appears, highlight the url tag underneath it. It looks like this: [IMG]http:// .....[/IMG]. You do need to make sure they are of a certain size, no wider than 490 pixels. If this seems to complicated, I don't mind if you send them too me and I will post them on the forum with your permision. My e-mail is tmockait@depaul.edu

posted 02-15-2006 05:47 PM            

Refer to the this link for a recent forum thread on the same subject.
Another Whatzit?

Tom

posted 02-16-2006 12:53 PM            

I'm glad your photos were posted - as we were saying once we had a look at what you had, we would have a chance at giving you a much more helpful response.

By the way, my name is Kimo, rather than Kim. Kimo is the Hawai'ian version of the given name James. It is pronounced KEE-mo.

posted 02-16-2006 02:30 PM            

Or maybe South America? You could take your silver bombillas to Argentina and sip some mate with the gauchos (South American cowboys) during the day, go to the opera in Buenos Aires at one of the fanciest opera theaters in the world and afterwards go to a club and dance the tango until the wee hours of the morning.

posted 02-16-2006 04:13 PM            

Interestingly, the original root is the Latin bombus, or noise. There is a class of musical instruments known in Spanish as bomba (they have similar tubular form). There's also a music and dance genre in Puerto Rico and Cuba, of African derivation, called bomba, which is based on drumming, which perhaps goes more obviously back to the Latin root.