Lucky for me our Internet is back up, Comcast has been down. No surprise.
There is just something about an old bible, granted it makes me nervous to open one, but they are gorgeous to look at. In a way I wish books were still bound the way they use to be. Even better than what the outside looks like, is the inner contents.
Years ago, when my great-grandfather died ( I was six at the time), my mother was given a stack of old family bibles to use for our family genealogy. Back before the days of Ancestry.com and other sites, bibles were often how families kept up with important events and records. The stack she got her hands on were a treasure trove of marriages, babies, and deaths. It doesn’t hurt that throughout the years little notes were made throughout the bibles.
I don’t necessarily know if my own mother has kept up with genealogy in her bibles over the years, but I have snagged a peek and she had noted little things from sermons over the years. That alone can be a lot of fun to look through when tracing genealogy, even though it doesn’t exactly help to determine who was who and who married who you can still get a good idea about who the person carrying that bible really was and what they thought was important enough to note over the years. When I was much younger, my mom was very active in tracing our family history; we have boxes and stacks of tin photos and letters from years and years ago. To this day I still love dragging out the photos and post cards and imagining just what their lives were like.
This week Jeremy actually surprised me by getting both of us new bibles, the ESV study bible to be exact. My mental wheels immediately started turning!
What would I do first with this unblemished book?
Highlight it half to death?
Put all 30 of my random book marks in their permanent place?
Or…
Take advantage of the completely blank pages that were just waiting to be filled in?
After highlighting all of my SSMT verses in pink from the past few years I immediately took to filling out the marriages, deaths, and births. Instead of starting at the immediate point A, I decided to begin at our marriage and mark every event from there on out.
Our wedding – 5/30/09
Nanny’s death – 9/5/09
Joshua’s birth – 1/10/10
Hopefully the only thing being added to in the next few years involve marriage and babies. While death is an important page for genealogy, I am not a fan of writing there. Now one day, years and years from now one of our great grand children or their kids will have their hands on our bibles and see all of the dates. Hopefully they will appreciate the hand written events as much as I enjoy looking at the events in our family bibles. I hope that our future kids, grand-kids, and great grand-kids want to flip through the pages and see what scripture we marked, what dates we wrote on passages, and all of the little notes within.
I can only hope though.
Hope that the Internet doesn't take over so much that the interest in old personal items for genealogy's sake isn't lost; and our family stories, pictures, and documents carry on through our kids, and their kids as well.
Because let's face it, there is nothing cooler than peeking inside a worn out old bible and seeing just what that person deemed important in their life.
