Create FamilyBibles.com, which would function like FindaGrave.com to collect information from millio

LegacyUser

George Scott said: In the 1800s and early 1900s it was common in the United States, UK, Australia and New Zealand for families to record the births and deaths of family members in their family Bible. These are some of the best sources of family history data. The problem is how to access this data, as family Bibles are personal possessions dispersed among a population of about 150 million households.

I have probably worked on over 200,000 Family Tree records, and I can only recall seeing a handful of records which cited information from family Bibles. In greatest likelihood several other FT records contain information taken from family Bibles, but they don't explicitly cite or document family Bibles as a source and therefore the information is treated the same as family traditions or hearsay.

Family Bibles eventually physically wear out and are frequently discarded, despite their immense value as family history sources. So, my thought was, wouldn't it be great if there were a website called FamilyBibles.com which would function like Findagrave.com? It would be a wiki community effort to preserve and publish the data contained in family Bibles. It would do for family Bibles what FindaGrave.com does for grave sites, which has been immeasurably valuable for family history.

It could be a joint venture between FamilySearch and Ancestry.com. Local historical societies could help get out the word. FindaGrave.com (currently a subsidiary of Ancestry.com) and other genealogical websites could also help get out the word.

Contributors would take a photograph of the family registry in the family Bible and transcribe the family registry. Contributors could also add some commentary explaining where the family lived, etc., to help identify the family. The website could have an input form similar to the one at FindaGrave.com.

FamilySearch's Family Tree and Ancestry.com's public family trees could have links to the family Bibles the same way they have links to FindaGrave memorials.

As for funding, from its creation in 1995 until it was purchased by Ancestry.com in 2013, FindaGrave.com was funded with advertising. It was a free website with no subscriptions. Since 2013 Ancestry.com has funded FindaGrave.com, presumably as a marketing tool. So there are a few different options for funding FamilyBibles.com.

LegacyUser

Carol Jo Menges said: I believe I just recently heard of a new group doing what sounded like this exact thing. Naturally, I can't remember the details... But in all the hours I spend on family history work over the days and weeks and so forth, one of those messages I read somewhere spoke to this. Some group trying to get it going--something like that.

LegacyUser

Amy Archibald said: This site is already doing what you are suggesting:
http://yanceyfamilygenealogy.org/fami...

LegacyUser

Carol Jo Menges said: I think that's the news I'd read earlier and mentioned above. Looks good!

LegacyUser

George Scott said: Thanks, Amy. I appreciate the info and will keep that site in mind for future reserch, but it's really not what I was thinking of.

First, (and I should explain that I'm a retired software engineer), the site isn't set up for links from Family Tree to use a given family Bible as a source. For instance, all the Bibles for everyone with the surname Scott (my surname) are in a single pdf file. Each surname has one pdf file. So it's impossible to create a link from a Family Tree record to a given family Bible. In order to cite a family Bible in a Family Tree record, each family Bible needs to be a record, not simply on a very long list of Bibles in a surname pdf file.

Secondly, the website is basically an index of family Bible data in other archives, principally the D.A.R. database. So even if the pdf files were converted into individual records, the record would still simply be a reference to another website.

Thirdly, it doesn't identify the geographical location of the family and in many cases it provides no time frame. I noticed a few family Bibles of men named Robert Scott with no time frames, so I would have to go to the referenced archives and search each one to see whether one of them might be the Robert Scott I was looking for.

The beauty of FindaGrave.com is its simplicity. You type in a name on their search screen and within seconds you have exactly what you were searching for (assuming a memorial exists for the individual you are seeking). Findagrave almost exploded in growth shortly after it was created because of its simplicity.

Please don't get me wrong--I am very pleased to learn of the website you referenced. It's a good site for a diligent family historian to search for a given family Bible, copy down the data, and type the data into a Family Tree record. That can be invaluable. But it would not be the source documentation site that I was envisioning.

Again, thanks greatly for a good tip.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: While family bibles are important sources of family genealogical information, the ready availability of those bibles is almost non-existent. Unless they have been donated in some manner and filmed or digitized, you are unlikely to find much available on FamilySearch. The biggest interest is in those records where a large number of people will benefit, such as Church and Civil records.

In my 50+ years of research, I have found that generally speaking, family bibles disappear like personal collections of genealogical records when a person dies. They seldom are kept or preserved unless they belonged to a famous personality.

As far as using other sites, FamilySearch allows a person to create a source for a record (or memory) from outside FamilySearch. This can then be used as a source and if an image is present, the image uploaded as a memory and that memory used as a source.

FamilySearch's sources are person-centric, when ideally, a source should be source centric, meaning that the source itself is fully cited, but attached to a number of people, using the same source. That is one of the major purposes of the source box.