Tracking the Progress of Some Special Items Over the Past Year.

After this year's roller coaster of antiques auctions, with hyped lots flopping and sleepers blowing past estimates, the fates of newsworthy objects can be hard to trace. Auction houses typically identify buyers with cryptic phrases like ''private European collector'' or ''American institution'' and are even cagier about the whereabouts of unsold material. Here are a few transactions that can be tracked (often thanks to diligent reporting from two trade papers, Maine Antique Digest, and Antiques and the Arts Weekly), and a survey of how owners are gearing up to share the acquisitions with the public or at least a few neighbors. OLD JAKE The mood darkened halfway through the Americana sale on Jan. 24 at Sotheby's New York, when Old Jake, an 1850s copper weathervane shaped like a trumpet-wielding fireman, went unsold. (Bids stopped at $2.1 million on the $3 to $5 million estimate, partly because the vane was coated in 20th-century silver paint.) A fire company in Winchester, Va., which had removed Old Jake from its firehouse turret to consign at Sotheby's, has put it on long-term loan at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester. Since July, Old Jake has been pinned on a gallery wall above re-creations of vintage kitchens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]