Have you ever heard of Bible Documentation Day? It isn’t a national holiday, or even one specific to a particular state. It is a day that the South Central Pennsylvania Genealogical Society set aside to help people do genealogy research from their old family bibles.
Those old family bibles that have been handed down from one generation to the next can hold a wealth of genealogy information. Previous generations of your family may have used their bible as the place to record births, marriages, and deaths of family members. There might be information about the birth places of several of your ancestors noted near their birth dates.
I had never heard of Bible Documentation Day until I ran across a few news articles that discussed it. It isn’t a national holiday, or even something that all genealogical associations are going to participate in. If I had to guess, I would say it is a unique event that the South Central Pennsylvania Genealogical Society decided to hold.
It took place on Sunday, May 6, 2012, and was held at the York County Heritage Trust. This was the second annual Bible Documentation Day. Around 17 people arrived with a total of 30 family bibles. The heritage trust copied the family information from those bibles, for free, to place within their library.
One of the reasons to make copies of the information is because the Heritage Trust doesn’t have the storage facilities to store a bunch of actual family bibles. The copied information is available for genealogists who come to the Heritage Trust in search of more information about their relatives and ancestors. It makes that information much more accessible for more genealogists than the ones who happen to belong to the particular family that owns the bible.
Are you looking for information that may have come from an old family bible that you don’t have in your hands? GeneaLinks has some resources for you to start with. At the top of the list is a link to a site called “Bible Records Online”. It has images and transcripts from over 100 bibles that came from over 500 families. There are several other links to choose from, too.
While you are thinking about it, now might be a good time to see if you can track down where the family bibles that your ancestors owned happened to end up. There could be important genealogical information written inside the cover! Make a copy of that information, to share with the other genealogists in your family.
Image by geraldbrazell on Flickr