Last night I made a delightful discovery! In searching through my cedar chest for something, I ran across an old family Bible I had inherited. When I first received it, I had peeked inside it hopefully, expecting to find some family records in the first few pages. Disappointed to only find an extremely faded inscription inside the front cover, I had wrapped it back up and placed it in the cedar chest, unsure of what to do with it but unwilling to part with it just because it didn’t have a treasure trove of genealogical information.
of Waverly. 1866 Waverly Iowa
I’ve been fascinated by family history since I was a young girl, and for the last several years, genealogy has been the hobby I get lost in more than any other. I’m thankful that the generation above me has started to pass on family treasures, knowing that I will cherish them. This leather-bound Bible had long ago broken into two pieces, and I really wasn’t sure it was worth holding onto since it didn’t seem to contain any records.
For some reason, however, when I saw it as I was digging through my chest last night, I was inspired to take a closer look. As I remembered, there were no family record pages in the front or back of the book. Yet something compelled me to keep searching, and to my delighted surprise, I discovered several pages between the Old and New Testaments that did indeed contain entries of a marriage (between the man who had given the Bible to his wife and written the inscription on the front page), the deaths of those two people, and three generations of births (the last generation listed on a slip of paper that had been attached with a straight pin for some reason).
After posting about my find in a genealogy group on social media, I heard from a couple other people who had made similar discoveries of records after the Old Testament in Bibles from the 1800s. Having been active in genealogical groups for several years, I’m surprised I had never heard about this possibility before, but I’m so thankful to have found these pages, and I wanted to spread the word so other people who had faced similar disappointment could check their own Family Bibles to see if they had missed record pages that were placed before the New Testament.
I didn’t learn anything new from these pages, but there is something special about seeing the handwriting of my 3rd great-grandparents and touching the pages where someone so lovingly recorded the births of those who came before me. I always think of them as elderly, but Pollie Ann Hiserodt, the original recipient of the Bible, was only 34 when she passed away, and her husband George Soash was only 50. Yet from their three children, they have many descendants, and now this tattered old book has become even more treasured as I consider the honor of being the one who gets to preserve it for future generations.
