To many, the small, circular symbols project an air of sophistication and class, their delicate, colorful presence conjuring thoughts of royalty and refinement.
Even today, they’re sometimes used on invitations to weddings or other special events to make clear a letter is of the utmost importance.
But turn back the pages of time and take a closer look at the wax seals once used for correspondence and a story may emerge, one that tells a family’s history or provides greater context about the lives of some of the region’s earliest settlers.
That’s what Daniel Bottino, a doctoral candidate in history at Rutgers University, has discovered over the past several years as he has pored over hundreds of documents dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries, many of them housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collections.
“Looking at these seals on these documents is something new that I think people haven’t really done,” said Bottino, 29, who is on track to receive his doctorate next year. “Certainly people have studied seals, but they are usually not personal seals. These are seals of individual people.”
“Most of these people we don’t know anything about. This could give a lot more personal info about them, a little glimpse into their personal life.”
Bottino’s fascination with the letter seals started as he began working on his thesis, which examines how English colonists in Maine viewed the landscape as they settled there.
To learn about their livelihoods, he examined property deeds from that time, traveling to various institutions to sift through their archives. This included the Massachusetts Historical Society, which he first visited three years ago.
Reviewing the historic documents meant encountering the wax seals that people used to close or validate legal documents such as estate and financial papers.
While seals are often chipped or in poor condition — or in many cases, gone altogether, leaving behind only a red stain — their intricate details piqued his interest. Eventually, they became a small part of his overall research.
“I started to realize that if I wanted to understand how people viewed these documents in this time period, then the process of making a seal was a critical part of it,” he said.
When finished, his thesis will include a roughly 20-page section on the often overlooked artifacts, which have been sitting in plain sight for hundreds of years.
As Bottino is the first to admit, the legal dealings of ordinary people aren’t the most evocative historical documents. John Hancock’s writings, these are not.
But delving into the meanings behind the seals has been nothing short of fascinating, he said.
It’s also led to a short-term fellowship with the Massachusetts Historical Society to continue his research on the subject and dig deeper “into the secrets of these seals,” he said. Already, he has photographed and documented hundreds of seals buried within the society’s collections.
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, the historical society’s director of research, said the group’s collection contains millions of manuscript pages. But as Bottino is demonstrating, not all researchers who sift through them are interested in the texts alone.
“He is looking at something that is often overlooked by other researchers, which is fascinating and exciting,” Wongsrichanalai said in a statement. “He is showing us what these little wax seals can teach us about the people who made them centuries ago. He is opening up new vantage points into their world.”
In a recent blog post on the society’s website, Bottino said that “throughout the entire Colonial era, and into the beginning of the nineteenth century, legal records required the imprinting of personal seals” — and all of them likely tell a story.
“If these stories can be unlocked, we will open a valuable window into a rich world of symbolism, ritual, and beliefs previously hidden from view,” he wrote.
The seals often varied by social status, Bottino said, and came in different sizes. Some early New England residents used stamping instruments, or a “matrix,” to make their mark, handheld objects with a carved pattern or symbol that signified who they were. Others simply used their fingerprints, pressing down into the melted wax.
At the time when seal use was universal, many people couldn’t read, so having a visual medium connected to a specific person or family helped convey that a document was authentic and say who it was from, he said.
“The imagery of seals really mattered,” Bottino said. “In order to know who it was that was signing and sealing these documents, they would look to the image of the seal rather than the text.”
Most people seemed to put a good amount of thought into their seal and in some cases, it appears that families passed the images down through generations.
“If you had a family member who died, you would probably take their seal rather than buying a new one,” he said. “[A family] emblem could be used; some seals have letters on them that represent the name of the sealer.”
One of the most interesting seals that he discovered bucked the trend of red wax. The black seal, which shows the image of a “sacrificial pelican” with its wings spread, was on a deed from the 1600s that belonged to Rebecca Winsor of Boston.
Winsor was a mother of eight children whose husband died shortly before the deed, which documented the sale of land to one of her sons, was created, Bottino wrote in his blog post.
At first glance, it may seem uninspiring. But Bottino thinks the black wax represented her mourning, while the bird’s imagery — “a mother pelican piercing her breast to shed blood for the nourishment of her offspring” — was perhaps a nod to her role as a selfless caregiver.
”There’s clear personal ties to the person who made the seal,” he said.
And now the deeper meaning behind it, one that could have easily been lost to time, has taken flight.
Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him @steveannear.