Throwback Thursday – Family Bibles

For this “Throwback Thursday” how about access to what a lot of people used to use to “store” their genealogy databases/family trees before we had home computers – the family Bible. Over on reddit, user “sushibait” posted a link to a directory they created (sushibait.com), that contains links to (and sources for) over 83,000 family Bibles. They are sorted by surname.

For those not familiar with them, in the past, many families used Bibles to keep track of their major life events – births, deaths, marriages, burials, etc. Bibles would include extra blank pages for this purpose, and if you’ve done enough genealogy research, at least in the US, you might have come across a Bible that has family records of relatives that didn’t make it into a government archive, or were mentioned in passing. For example, a census might show that a woman had 5 children, but only 4 are living at the time of that census, and it could be that the child that passed away at a young age and was never recorded in any documents outside of a family Bible. It can also include information on those relatives that were truly “off the gird” and only sporadically showed up in records.

Some of the sources include:

• Ancestry.com collections
• Archive.org
• Daughters of the American Revolution
• FamilySearch collections
• Local and state archives
• Local and state libraries (like Tennessee’s state collection of family Bibles)
• Local and state genealogy societies.

Note: These are links to the Bible locations/sources – the Bibles/PDFs/etc. are not stored on the website – this is basically a large catalog pointing you to where various family Bibles are held. Some of these are links/sources to PDF copies of the Bibles, while others are for where Bibles are held physically. It can include surnames, and even the name(s) of main family members. They can include links to where you can get photocopies if they aren’t online, or where you can visit and look at them in-person.

A typical entry looks like this:

SURNAME: STARR
UNDER THIS SURNAME - A FAMILY BIBLE RECORD EXISTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE FOLLOWING FAMILY/PERSON:

FAMILY OF:     STARR, JOHN  (1775-1863)
SPOUSE:        LYDIA BUTTON

MORE INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND IN RELATION TO THIS BIBLE - AT THE FOLLOWING SOURCE:
SOURCE: ONLINE INDEX: D.A.R. BIBLE RECORD DATABASE
FILE/RECD: BIBLE DESCRIPTION: JOHN STARR (1775-1863) AND WIFE, LYDIA BUTTON (1784-1830)
NOTE: SOURCE: GRC - CT:S1:V44 PAGE: 229 - BOOK TITLE: CONNECTICUT DAR GRC REPORT ; S1 V044 : BIBLE RECORDS

THE FOLLOWING INTERNET HYPERLINKS CAN BE HELPFUL IN FINDING MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS FAMILY BIBLE: *example link at the D.A.R. portal*

GROUP CODE: 02

Keep in mind that when you click on a “SURNAME.PDF” (in my example STARR.PDF) you will need to scroll down and down and down because there could be dozens or even hundreds of entries, and as you scroll down, you’ll come across the entries above, one per page that you scroll down.

There is a lot to sort through, and this is an amazing resource – I’ve already made notes on a handful of family Bibles that I didn’t know about.

Links: reddit discussion (/r/Genealogy)

Catalog/Directory: https://sushibait.com

Icon source: Wikimedia Commons