Family Bible records

What the pages hold

The printed family record usually has columns or lines for births, marriages and deaths, sometimes with a decorated title page of its own. Families wrote more than that. You may find the names of godparents, the hour of a birth, the place a family moved to, a note about a son who went to war, or the births of enslaved people in the household. Look in the margins, on the flyleaves inside the covers, and on the blank pages at the back.

Loose papers tucked inside matter too: funeral cards, newspaper clippings, locks of hair wrapped in paper, letters, or a marriage certificate. Note where in the book each item was found, because that may be the only clue to which family it belonged to.

How to date the entries

The first question is when the entries were written, not when the events happened. Turn to the title page, and the back of it, and find the date the Bible was printed or copyrighted. No entry could have been written before that date. A Bible printed in 1850 that records a birth in 1790 means the older entries were copied in later, from memory, from another book, or from a family story.

Then study the handwriting and the ink. The Social Security Administration, which has long accepted family Bibles as evidence of age, tells its staff to ask the same questions a careful genealogist would: Do the entries look as if one person wrote them all at the same time? Are there erasures or changes? Are the entries in order? Is the ink or pencil faded, and does the entry you care about look old or recent?

Entries written one at a time, in different inks and hands, as events happened, carry the most weight. A neat page in one hand and one ink, covering fifty years, was probably written all at once, and is more likely to contain mistakes. It is still valuable, but check it against other records. Watch for dates written in the old style before 1752, and for Quaker month numbers instead of month names.

Bibles in Revolutionary War pension files

Some of the best preserved Bible pages are at the National Archives. A widow who applied for a Revolutionary War pension had to prove she had married the soldier, and when there was no town or church record, she might send the family record pages from her Bible, or occasionally the whole book. The National Archives says its pension files hold letters, diaries, embroidered family trees, and more than 100 Bibles containing family information.

If your ancestor or his widow applied for a pension, read every page of the file, not only the summary. A torn-out leaf with a list of children's births may be filed among the affidavits. Later pension files, for the War of 1812 and after, can hold Bible pages too.

Collections at archives and libraries

State archives have gathered copies of family Bible pages for many years. The Library of Virginia has digitized over 7,000 Bible records, important because Virginia did not record births and deaths centrally until 1853; some of its bound volumes were compiled by the Virginia chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The State Archives of North Carolina collects copies of pre-1913 family entries, since statewide registration there began on October 1, 1913, and its Bible records are digitized and transcribed online.

The DAR Library in Washington holds a large collection of family Bible records, both copies of original pages and transcriptions, many of them in the Genealogical Records Committee reports, a set of more than 20,000 volumes compiled by DAR members. Part of the collection is indexed online, and the index can be searched from home. Some state libraries hold DAR Bible volumes too, like the Virginia DAR volumes at the Library of Virginia. Genealogical societies have printed Bible records in their journals for decades, so search those indexes for the family surname followed by the word Bible.

Photographing and transcribing your own

If you have a family Bible, record it before anything happens to it. Photograph the title page with its printing date first, then each record page, the covers, the flyleaves and every loose item, in good daylight without flash. Lay the book on a soft surface and never press the spine flat.

Then make a transcription. Copy each entry exactly as written, line by line, keeping the original spelling, abbreviations and dates, and note changes of handwriting or ink. Write down who owns the Bible now, who owned it before, and how it passed down. Consider sending copies to your state archives, which many accept; that way the record survives even if the book does not.