"'A Family Treasure Beyond Measure; Blanket A 'Roadshow' Hit" Star Tribune (Minneapolis MN), January 19, 2005 "As soon as she heard the words 'national treasure' and the number '$60,000 -or more,' Rita Joerg of Preston, Minn., knew where to store her great-great-grandmother's handwork: in a bank safe-deposit box. Joerg said Tuesday she took the beadwork to the St. Paul filming of the 'Antiques Roadshow' and learned, much to her amazement, that it's a museum-quality Dakota woman's dance blanket, used in ceremonies in the 1800s. Her great-great-grandmother, Jane Dickson LaFRAMBOISE, who was three-quarters Dakota and Ojibwe and one-quarter white, made it in about the 1840s of tiny beads and ribbons, all imported from England as trade goods. Because the blanket was made about the time she married Joseph LaFRAMBOISE, an interpreter to the Dakota and Ojibwe Indians in Minnesota, it's possible that the bride made the dance blanket for her 1845 wedding, considered the first Christian marriage in Nicollet County. Recent generations have had no idea of its value or even its use. They called it a table cover. Joerg said it was stored and sometimes displayed at the Sleepy Eye MN library from 1940 to 1972, but with no hint it was so valuable. After that it was in her mother's cedar chest and later in the cedar chest of Joerg's sister, Diane Arndt of Fairfax MN.