NORWICH – It’s everyone’s fantasy. It’s a typical Sunday afternoon and you’re paying the bills. There’s never enough money to make ends meet and you decide to give yourself a well-deserved break. Postponing the inevitable, you climb the steps to the attic to investigate something that sounds like it just might be bats in your belfry. The light is poor, as it always is in the attic, and you stumble upon a mysterious object. After finding nothing in the belfry (thank goodness), you drag the offending object down to the dining room table. One quick Internet search later you find out that the mysterious attic object is valuable enough to let you retire to your own private island in the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, the above scenario is highly unlikely and the treasure I’m here to talk about today is not one that’s going line your pockets. Rather, I’m referring to that ubiquitous and likely dilapidated item passed down generation to generation in Christian families – the family Bible.

Historically, most families didn’t own lots of books. If a family owned even one book, it was most likely The Book, the Bible. Since they were often the only book in the home, family Bibles became the logical place to record important family events like marriages, births, and deaths, and to stash important papers or photos. The publishing industry, knowing that this was the case, began to place pages, often in the front or middle of the book, specifically meant to write down important family events. In the days before widespread government record-keeping, these pages were sometimes the only place these events were recorded.

If you are lucky enough to have a family Bible, I encourage you to take a look at it. It is most likely in horrible shape, as these books were often mass-produced and not of the finest quality. It is highly unlikely that it has any monetary value, and restoring it would probably cost hundreds of dollars. The information in the book is obviously recorded elsewhere in the millions of other Bibles found in peoples’ homes. What you need to concern yourself with is the invaluable content your ancestors wrote on those family record pages.

There is a movement afoot to digitize and share these fragile records, and digitization is easy to do with your phone or tablet. All you need to do is photograph the cover, the title page with the date, and the family record pages and any documents the family slipped in between the pages. FamilySearch, a free equivalent to Ancestry.com, is one of the most logical places to share your family Bible information. Once you have good-quality files to share, go to https://form.jotform.com/fsvault/digital-book-donations-form to begin the process of sharing your family’s information.

Now you’ve shared the important family information and made it available for generations to come, but what of the Bible itself? If you don’t want to keep the Bible, there are some organizations that will accept them as donations. One is BibleRescue.org, which takes family Bibles, records the important information on the records pages, then allows individuals to buy the Bibles themselves.

Guernsey Memorial Library itself has acquired many family Bibles throughout the years. We are not accepting more and have already scanned the information from the Bibles we have and plan to donate the rest to BibleRescue.org. First, we would like to offer them up to interested members of the Norwich community. A list of the family Bibles we own appears below. Please contact us at guernsey@4cls.org to request a copy of the information pages or to express an interest in any particular Bible before July 1, 2024, after which we will arrange to send them to BibleRescue.org.

Family Bibles: Abell, Browning, Burdick, Carr, Child, Curtis, Eaton, Foote & Main, Gorham, Hicks, Jaquith, Johnson, Knowles, Latham Latimer, Lee, Mueller Groetzinger, Oakley Benson, Pendleton, Pettit, Randall, Roe Browning, Shattuck, Thompson Moulton, Tobey, Truesdell Richmond, Warner, Webb, Wells, Wheeler, White.

– From the Guernsey Memorial Library