In the early 1980s, the Young family Bible was passed down to me from my father. We had looked at it together much earlier, especially the family records it contained. All of the entries for births and deaths, beginning in 1802 and ending in 1890, were in the same hand, presumably my great-grandfather’s.
For years after I received it, I did the time-honored family thing: kept it wrapped in brown paper and twine and on a closet shelf. I did eventually buy an acid-free box to store it in, but it was fragile. The binding was coming apart, the ink on the family records was fading, and some of the pages were loose.
My wife read a story in St. Louis Magazine about a local book conservator who had trained at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. In early 2022, I contacted him, we made an appointment, and he offered an initial assessment of what it would cost. He also found something that had been missed for decades – tucked in among one of the Prophets was an envelope containing a lock of auburn hair, presumably that of my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young.
I had copies of the family records, and it was these that I poured over and compared to listings in Family Search. Surprisingly, the Biblical records and the online listings were surprisingly identical. But the online list omitted a name contained in the Bible, that of Jarvis Seale, with the date of death recorded as April 6, 1862. Whoever he was, and no one in the family seemed to know (my father guessed a cousin), he was considered important enough for my great-grandfather to record his death.
I stayed mystified, until I investigated the date. It was the Battle of Shiloh.
More digging found he was the husband of one of my great-grandfather’s sisters. Mystery solved.
That discovery led me to consider two other dates – the ones for my great-grandfather’s two brothers. They, too, died in the Civil War, leaving my great-grandfather, still a teenager, as the only surviving son.
He was the one who bought the Bible and started the records. My book conservator said that the Bible was sold door-to-door by the tens of thousands in the late 1860s and 1870s. Many bought the book to record family records; so many people had died in the war that surviving families on both sides of the conflict were determined to keep a record. And too many, like Jarvis Seale, had been buried in unmarked mass graves.
I looked at the dates for those deaths, and I told myself there was a story here, a story of how a family survived the Civil War.
Those deaths, and the lock of my great-grandmother’s hair, eventually became one of the inspirations for my historical novel (and historical romance) Brookhaven.
Related:
Restoring the Family Bible – and More.
The Mystery Man in the Family Bible.
Top photograph: a page from the Bible’s family records, before restoration.
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