When Bibles Were Family Treasures

A phone call came to me the other day. Our local bookstore owner said he'd received a large family Bible and wondered if the library would like to have it. I referred him to Irene, our genealogist in the Ellen Payne Odom Genealogical Library, who I felt would be very interested.
This morning I decided to see if Irene had accepted the Bible. Sure enough, there it was sitting on her desk. A dark cloth-bound Bible, it is 9 inches by 11-1/2 inches with a 2-1/2 inch spine. The first copyright date was 1923 and the last 1936. On the back of the title page is a stamped blue ribbon that states: Awarded the Blue Ribbon at the Texas Centennial Celebration, Dallas, Texas 1936. It is a New Standard Reference Bible.
Someone had filled in the family members' military service records, Domestic and Foreign Service records, as well as Discharge. It has a Family Register with the names of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren, along with births and deaths filled in.
I sat with the book in front of me. When I touched it, I felt I was touching an actual piece of time and history.
Someone had written loved ones' birthdays on the second page of the inside cover. The third page was a picture of a painting in color titled The Creation of Light - After Dore's Black and White by Max Bihn with a 1912 copyright.
The presentation page read: To Lillie Mathis by her husband Brady Mathis in Moultrie, GA.
As I turned the pages, I realized it was not necessarily a "study" Bible, but a treasure-keeper of family history, as well as the page from a favorite Sunday School lesson, a newspaper clipping of a relative's 60th wedding anniversary, and special bookmarks.
The Bible had ended up at our local bookstore. It made me wonder - was this one of the dearest possessions someone took with them to a nursing home? Or had it been forever on someone's buffet in the dining room? Whose hands were the last hands of a family member to touch it? Why wasn't it with family now? So many questions.
I sat and looked at the frayed cover with thin strings hanging off of it, the spine's binding broken from the front cover, the yellowed pages. I felt as if we should give it a proper burial, but it's such an important piece of history. Someone's family history!
When I asked Irene what she was going to do with it, she said she'd make copies of the family records to place in the Odom Library, then she'd put the Bible in a box in storage along with the two or three others she has.
Maybe someone out there will recognize these names recorded in the Bible: Brady Connie Mathis and Lellie Strawder Mathis, James and Beatrice Ricks, and George Howard Hiers, Jr.
If so, a treasure of your family history is at the Odom Genealogical Library, right here in Moultrie, Georgia.