Here is a picture of a Russian Mother's medal, based on the # of kids she had.

Regarding Harry Waterson's inquiry about Lindbergh's Chinese medal, I've checked all sources of information on pre-1949 Chinese orders & medals known to me, including the Harry Mohler Collection of Chinese medals at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In this vast collection of over 900+ items, there was not a hint of anything like the Lindbergh medal.

I'd take with a grain of salt the reportage in the interesting Nanking, Sept. 25 (1931) news clipping that Harry found, about the Chinese Nationalist Gov't. having created a new aviation award with Lindbergh as the first recipient. Though it may have been gazetted, it's far more likely that Chiang, needing something special to award Lindbergh in recognition of his flood relief efforts, had this aviation medal "established" just for him, an item that almost assuredly is a one-off piece never awarded to anyone else.

Can anyone can tell us anything about this item's usage or origins? It was shown to me by a dealer correspondent who supplied the following provenance information:

• "Copper. 29mm. It came from a small accumulation, I think probably of an 1890s Plymouth sailor, which contained various Devon Pub Checks and several Danish West Indies St Thomas tokens of that decade."

Superficially, it looks as if it ought to be one of the anonymous colonial pieces discussed in the Withers' "British Copper Tokens. 1811-1820", but there is no sign of it either there or in any of several other books on the British and Canadian tokens of the period.

I have already asked several very knowledgeable numismatists over here {various places in England & Wales, including Paul and Bente Withers}, and all they could come up with in terms of literary references were two or three from the mid-19th century, none of which did more than just describe the piece. There was nothing to enlighten us on usage or origin. For example:

• Illyrisches Blatt no. 31, 1st August 1844, Leibach (Ljubljana) Slovenia, published by Ignaz Alois Edler v. Kleinmayr. In a chapter entitled Verzeichniss der eingegangenen Museal-Geschenke: the token is described, with the legend quoted, among British tokens given to the museum, but no other details about its use or origin are given.

• Neumann vol 4 (1863), page 256, no.25692

The British Museum apparently acquired a specimen in 1870 and have it tentatively attributed to Ireland, but that sounds rather dubious.

Our best conjecture to date is that it is probably a factory or truck shop token, but that also is still far from certain.