GUEST: This table I inherited through my family.

A great uncle named Anthyme made this.

And so he was my great-great-grandfather's brother.

And I believe that he had gifted this to his youngest brother.

Anthyme worked for over 50 years in the Homestake Mine in South Dakota.

And before that, he had moved with his family as a young boy, uh, from Valcourt, Quebec.

APPRAISER: So he was miner by day, and then marquetry extraordinaire by night.

This was...

GUEST: I-- yes, I suppose so.

This must have taken a very long time to make.

APPRAISER: Yeah.

The craftsmanship is so precise.

And this is all about this tabletop.

When you look at the table itself...

I mean, in terms of a furniture designer, he was not a furniture designer.

He was a master of marquetry.

So when we turn over the table... And look at the base of it, it looks like it has been made by an engineer, by, by someone who is really understanding, you know, you want to put this thing together, but it's not terribly graceful.

All of the grace, uh, is in the top of it.

A whole group of exotic woods in here: African ebony wood, satinwood from India.

There's just plain old oak wood, which we see here.

I know he, uh, pulled maple from Vermont.

People actually mailed him samples of woods from all over the world, which is kind of cool.

There's also some indication that his work, Leveque's work, which was his last name, showed up in Folk Art Museum in, uh, in New York in a show.

GUEST: I believe so, yes.

APPRAISER: Yes.

GUEST: Around... 1998, I believe.

Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: So, so the joy of this piece is that we know who made it.

Most of the marquetry furniture we find in the marketplace, we have no idea who made it.

We do have examples of his work, which we see in the photograph dated 1933.

He's born in 1880, so it's going to make him around 50 years old or so.

I would say we're probably looking at late 1920s, maybe even early '30s.

Uh, maybe at the beginning of his career, before he got very, very sophisticated in some of those finer pieces that we know he made.

This is a collecting area that has just sort of faded a little bit out of style.

This table, I would estimate it as an auction estimate in the $400 to $600 range.

It would be less than that if we didn't know who the maker was.

But the fact that we know who made it is really a charming, charming story.

GUEST: Well, this is really important to us, and we'll obviously keep this.