06 March 2012

Who Could Have That Family Bible?

Your great-great-grandparents probably have other descendants besides you. They may easily have several hundred descendants. Any of those individuals could have the family bible, pictures, or other items of genealogical interest.

Don't just look to your immediate family for this information.

5 comments:

  1. Seeking other descendants is an important part of research.

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  2. It is, but quite a few don't bother to do it.

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  3. Marinell Johnson ReevesMarch 6, 2012 at 8:13 AM

    About 15 years ago we traveled from Pennsylvania to Idaho and Wyoming to I met some first cousins. One of them had genealogy pages torn from two different Bibles, and several pages with hand written genealogical information. Since they had never worked on their family tree they had no idea who any of the people listed were. I brought them copies of my research which only went back about 120 years. The information they had picked up where mine ended. WOW, what a find!!! Fortunately for many generations people recognized the importance of those papers and didn’t throw them away.

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  4. Last year our family was contacted through Ancestry by people who had located a Bible and box of photos in the far corner of an attic in a home in Alberta, Canada. Our distant family members had moved from the house over 40 yrears ago. They turned it into a local historical society who contacted us and created a zip file of the vital records pages in the family Bible and of all the labeled photographs. I had shared lots of family history with a cousin and he had placed it on Ancestry and was contacted. Among the items was a four generation photo of my aunt, grandmother, great grandmother and gggrandfather which no one had ever seen before. We then directed the historical society to the closest actual relatives who had lived in the house.

    In short, we ended up with about 40 photos of family members from about the mid-1800's to the mid-1900's and the dates of births, marriages and deaths for my great-great grandparents family, including children who did not live to adulthood.

    Lesson learned, it pays to share family information.

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  5. Good reason to post on message boards -- surname as well as locality in order to find other descendants of our ancestors.

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