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Remember that blizzard two weekends ago? It blew open the balcony door to my father's printer room, covering his collection of 1950s pulp science fiction works in about five inches of snow. Fortunately it remained below freezing with the door open and snow coming in, so nothing got water-damaged. But in the process of digging out every single book and shoveling out the room, I came across an odd book. That's not the original cover--that was lost. It appears to be made of folded manila folders, probably by dad a few decades back. Penny for scale.  Both front and back covers are missing, and the spine is mostly gone. The strings holding the book together are in awful condition, and pages in the front and back are completely detatched. I have no faith in the binding's ability to hold pages in place if the book is every fully opened, so I won't be doing that. There are a bunch of loose documents tucked into the front of the folder-cover.  There's a new cover someone made at some point out of wallpaper. The first few dozen pages aren't bound in with the rest of the book, so it had already suffered significant damage before this repair job was done.   It's a bible! Just like the thread title said.   I'm not sure what translation it is yet, although I'm going to try to figure that out. It does, however, have a few dozen quite nice illustrations, each one with a sheet of onion skin bound into the book to protect it. You can see that, even through the onion skin, the image has stained the opposite page of text.   It also has a neat educational preface--it has an opening describing the tools, locations, and cultures mentioned in the body of the bible, among other subjects. Some of these are scattered within the bible verses-- over near Malachi there's a section on the currency exchange rates of all the denominations mentioned in the bible, written by Reverend Richard, Bishop of Peterborough.  These two cardboard pages were in the back, presumably just behind the back cover. There were no photographs contained within. More interestingly, the bible came with a small handful of documents.  A newspaper clipping; William Mathew's obituary.  The announcement of the opening of a church.  A wedding certificate, from July 19, 1846.    And these pages were originally bound into the front cover of the book. This bible was always intended to be a family bible, a keepsake handed down from parent to child that carried the history of the family in it. There's a fourth page (Happy Occurrences) which had no entries but was largely the same. Still, we have a family history here that spans over a century. Births Page posted:Edward and Theresa have no children. Which is probably how this bible wound up out of it's family's possession. Pops bought it back in the 80s from a used book store--he's not sure if he paid a dollar for it, or got it for the price of asking nicely. Either way, he got it in Philadelphia. While this pile of loose pages is of nearly no monetary value, it really feels like it's a family treasure that some family doesn't know they have. Edward and Theresa may be without progeniture, but surely some branch of the family remains that would value the bible. Any ideas on how to find them?
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Feb 4, 2016 04:43
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:08 |
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St Elizabeth's Parish House? I'll make some calls tomorrow, but I want to make sure I have the right one, as I'm not really sure the name hasn't changed in the past century. Presumably it's in Sea Cliff, but it's possible the owner of the bible moved at some point between the founding of the church and the death of Mr. Mathews. There's no date on the newspaper clipping, but the back was somewhat helpful.  That's an excerpt from, "A Mysterious Disappearance," a 1905 mystery. I know that back in the day they'd publish mysteries in serial in the newspaper, and that's chapter 23 of 31, so the newspaper is from 1904 or 1905. Before I start calling random Parish Houses and asking if anyone there had an ancestor who owned a bible, is it possible to find out specifically what date this chapter would have been published?
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Feb 4, 2016 23:30
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Earwicker posted:Actually looking at this stuff again I completely missed something. There is a different, older church listed on the marriage certificate. Presbyterian of Oyster Bay. It's still around and services are still performed there. I've shot them a phone call and hopefully they'll get back to me. While I don't expect them to have many records from 1846 (while the church was founded in 1842, it didn't get an actual building until 1873 and apparently the 50s were a dead period for the congregation) they may know something about some of the names that show up on the Deaths, Births, or Marriages pages. This is a church that mostly met in people's living rooms or other church's back offices, that the family left at the turn of the century for St. Elisabeth's. Spiritually important to its congregants, sure, but probably not a great repository for records. Marriage records have to be kept somewhere, though. If I wanted to look up a wedding from 1846, who would I talk to? The town, New York state? Earwicker posted:Do you know what newspaper it is? The newspaper's office might have an archive and can tell you, or you might even be able to find old copies of that paper on microfilm at a local library. Nope. What you see is what I've got.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:05
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Fantastic! Thanks a bunch. I'll be making contact tomorrow--if anything interesting happens, I'll be sure to share.
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Feb 7, 2016 23:37
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So, I've found the Last of the Thurstons, Bruce D. Thurston's sister, who still lives in New York. With the family name largely lost and only female heirs, who were of an age to take their Husband's names, she has been working on a family tree to preserve what's left of the family history. Then I plummet from the heavens, holding sheets from the middle of the ninteenth century, offering to pack 'em all up and ship them to her. "Why are you being so nice? Nobody's this nice anymore." "Oh, I think they still are. It's just pretty rare to find a book almost two hundred years old." She did seem pretty disappointed when I told her about the bible's condition, of course, but she's eager to regain so much of her family history. So I'll be packing up the bible as securely as I and a guy with some experience with fragile documents can manage this Friday. Before it leaves my possession, is anyone interested in specific pictures? e:Plot twist! So I just got some texts from (I assume) one of the nieces, who is unhappy that some stranger is calling up her mother and claiming to have something with the family name on it. She's pretty upset her mother gave me the family address. (I found it independently in the white pages, but hey, doxxing is spooky) She hasn't given me a name or deigned to speak over the phone, so we'll see how this goes. Mystic Mongol fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 03:16
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I guess. Although she's just asked me if I'm a hacker, and told me her husband is a cop. I did get a name and an email address from her, so we'll see if she warms up a bit once she sees that the bible is in too shoddy a condition to shake her down for money over.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:04
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Snapchat A Titty posted:Sweet, now you can hack her cyberbible Jesus ain't your savior any more, motherfucker. That's my salvation!
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Feb 9, 2016 04:09
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Ah, yes. So. Very embarrassing. It took me a few days to write the letter I included with the package, because I wanted to have an entire log of the bible's passage through my father's possession and my own included in the package. It came out nicely, eventually, and I made sure to credit two strangers on the internet who were of particular help, Earwicker and Snapchat a T. Yes, I censored your name a bit--always adjust language to audience. I hope you understand. Then I contacted a used book dealer pops does a lot of work for seeking advice on how to package this sucker. It fits snugly in a standard USPS mailing box, but the pages are incredibly fragile, and I was looking for concrete advice on how best to prevent damage. The advice I got was, basically, "Wrap it in newspaper and pray, because the only thing that'll work better is a bonded courier." There was a brief consideration of going down to New York and dropping it off myself, because hell, I'm unemployed, but that'd probably cause the neice to eat her own tongue and upgrade her retaliation to the imaginary FBI. So I've got it all nicely packaged up and in a box ready to go, as of about a week ago. Then I realized I'd lost the Thruston family address. And being a shy, delicate flower, I kiiiiinda put off calling the household to admit I was a dumb. But I have called them tonight and yup got everything ready and it's going in the mail Monday shut up. The bible's packed up all snug, the letter's in there, and it's getting shipped with tracking on Monday. The last Thurston admitted that, yes, she was kind of wondering why she hadn't gotten the bible yet or heard from me, but she's still happy and thankful to be receiving it real soon now, honest to god.
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Mar 5, 2016 02:47
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:08 |
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Time to wrap this up. Personal information removed not because I think anyone will hassle them, but because there's nothing else I can think of that information would be useful for.A nice old lady posted:I received the Bible and I can not begin to thank you enough for taking the time and "postage" to send me this piece of my history. The deaths and birth records alone filled so many blank spots on my family tree. I had recorded up to my Great Grandfather and Grandmother but now I have the record of their parents. Just so amazing. Looks like this is the end of my part of the story.
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Mar 10, 2016 22:56
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