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I purchased a box full of pins, buttons, and other similar items at an auction a little over a week ago. I’ve been doing pretty well on figuring them out, but I have three that have me stumped. I did find a number of fraternal items in the pile such as the Freemasons and a group associated with the Elks, so possibly these are related to such groups.
There are three photos:
The first is a patch with a Patriarchal cross in grey on a light blue background
The second is a pair of metal cuff links with a Maltese type cross with a crown in the center
The last is a Fleur De Lis metal pin with red and blue. Perhaps it is for the Boy Scouts, but the symbol doesn’t match exactly.
Any help is appreciated.
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Hey Sharon, the patch is a US Army unit dress (full color rather than black and green) shoulder patch and the two pins are Distinctive Unit Insignia, also Army. The pins are worn on the epaulettes of the dress uniform jacket, for example. The cufflinks do not look US military at all. Maybe fraternal, possibly fire department. Could be foreign military but nothing common. The patch and DUIs I can probably find out and get back to on what unit they’re for.
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The shoulder sleeve insignia – called the “Cross of Lorraine” – is for what used to be the 79th Infantry Division in WWI and WWII and is now the 79th Theater Sustainment Command, a US Army Reserve unit in Los Alamitas, CA. The DUIs are for the 347th Replacement Battalion, a US Army Reserve unit which has been reactivated and deactivated over the years for various wars but does not seem to be in existence at the moment.
Still striking out on the cuff links though it occurs to me they could also be a car or motorcycle brand emblem.
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Wow – this is great information, and I don’t know that I would have found this on my own. The box lot did have a number of military items especially wrt army and WWII. I wouldn’t have thought that a cross would be part of a US military uniform, but what do I know?
Do you have an online source of military information? I have used http://www.ezrackbuilder.com to understand the stripes on ribbons.
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Military information can be difficult to research online because there is so much of it, and so many different types of things and from different eras.
If I don’t know what something is outright I have hard copy references but I usually just Google it. There are many specialty sites but Wikipedia is an excellent quick reference. In this case my recollection was that the patch was for an infantry division so I googled “US army division patches” which got me here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_insignia_of_the_United_States_Army
And the patch was easy to spot. A little more googling then got me to more up to date information.The DUIs can be harder to identify. There used to be online keyword-searchable database operated by the US Army Heraldry Institute but it has been down since last year. This one I had never seen but I found it easily in a reference I have.
The Google Image search is my last resort. Take a good jpg and drag it into the search box to get pages of similar images to look through.
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Thanks for all the good information. I’ve bookmarked the Wikipedia page you listed in case I run into a similar item again.
For the cuff links, I continued to research even trying an image search, but really couldn’t find anything. I saw on the back of the cuff links that they were made by Swank, so I searched on that. Possibly, these are of their own design and not an emblem of anything. I found these on Etsy, which are similar.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/273319198/vintage-swank-royal-copenhagen-porcelain
I’ve listed mine for much less.
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Sharon,
firefighters are big collectors. Maybe the symbol is a fireman at the top of a ladder? You may have already, may be worth it to advertise / keyword them as vintage firefighter fire mans dress uniform fire mans ball etc. different fire companies have different symbols/mascots ie black cats dice ladders top hats.
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