Contact the specific Smithsonian museum where the object was donated. Have the name of the donor, date of donation, and object description available. If you do not have this information, you can also search across the collections that have been digitized to date on the Smithsonian Collections Search Center.

If you are still unable to locate information contact the Smithsonian Archives. Please note that it is important to know the name of the donor. Each donation to the Smithsonian receives an accession number. The earliest accession records of the Smithsonian are only indexed by the name of the donor (or in some case the name of an organization). Archives staff will be able to search this index, and if the donor's name is found, look at the accession correspondence.