Here at the Historical Society of Montgomery County, we have a robust collection of family Bibles. A large family Bible was often the only book a family owned, and it was passed down through the generations. Originally, families used the flyleaves or endpapers of the book to record the family’s births, marriages, and deaths (flyleaves are those blank pages at the beginning and end of a book, the endpapers are the thicker sheets that are glued to the inside of the cover).
By the 19th century, publishers were producing Bibles specifically to be family Bibles. They came with extra pages between the Old and New Testaments to record family events. The first American to print such a family Bible was Isaac Collins of Trenton. We have two copies of his 1791 family Bible in our collection. In his Bibles the extra pages are left blank. Later Bibles would have decorated pages often with color illustrations.
Family Bibles were very popular in the 19th century, a period of increasing literacy and consumerism. They were often sold by traveling salesmen.
The genealogical information in family Bibles is gold to a researcher, but otherwise the Bibles are pretty much the same (sometimes they’re exactly the same). They’re very large books, obviously meant to be kept in a place of honor. At three or four inches in width, it’s easy for this archivist to work through a shelf of Bibles in a couple of hours. On the other hand, they take up a lot of our limited shelf space for 2 or 3 pages of information. For that reason, we no longer accept family Bibles (though we do accept photocopies or scans of the records).
I hope to finish cataloging these Bibles soon. Once I do, I’ll post of list of the family names on our website with the archival finding aids.
Dear Nancy, I didn’t see any date stamp on this. I am definitely interested in which families are represented. I had much family in Montgomery County, and Berks County.