“Yesterday was Mother’s Day in the US. This week, let’s take a look at the mothers you’re researching. (They do make up half of your family tree, after all!)“
Greetings. After several – ahem, 13 – weeks of neglecting my blog, I felt inspired to write something based on the most recent “52 Ancestors” prompt, and a recent re-discovery of my Nan’s family bible. This originally belonged to her grandmother, Hannah Elizabeth Wright – a loving mother who I’d love to think about and remember while writing this prompt.
Below are some photos of the bibles pages, 138 years since she appears to have received it for her 16th birthday. Elizabeth’s parents were James Wright of Snelston, and Elizabeth Yeomans of Roston.
The bible itself is in a sorry state. It’s clung together with sellotape down the spine, with pages torn, creased, and hanging out, newspaper clippings taped to pages.
I don’t know what the future holds for this delicate family document. I’m unsure how to go about preserving something that is already in a poor condition, but I know that it needs to be kept safe as it has clearly been a precious gift passed from mother to son, from husband to wife, and then from mother to daughter. At this time, it’s still in my Nan’s hands.
The most wonderful thing about this family bible is that it has three generations of women’s handwriting in – my Nan, my great-“Nanny Etwall” Irene Griffin, and my great-great-grandmother, Hannah Elizabeth Wright. My Nan’s birth is written in it in my 2x great grandmother’s handwriting, and that seems like such a beautiful and important relic of our family’s history. Unfortunately I can’t share this as the writing from my Nanny Etwall and my Nan pertains to living people.
Elizabeth passed away on 13th October 1955, and she was buried in the new cemetery at Longford where her husband, Josiah Large, had been buried in 1941. My Nan has memories of her wearing her Sunday best and attending St Chad’s church in Longford, Derbyshire.
Do you have a family bible? If so, how do you preserve it?
If you’re a Large, a Griffin, or a Wright from South Derbyshire/East Staffordshire area, or you just think that we might be related based on some of the information in this post, feel free to get in touch through derbygenes@outlook.com, or through Twitter or Instagram @derbygenes. I’d love to know if we’re related.
What a lovely post and how lucky you are that this treasure has been passed down! And I love all the dogs. I keep meaning to do a blog post on the ancestral dogs—there were so many!
There are no family Bibles that have made their way close to me from any branch of my family, although I’ve found information on Ancestry from several.
Yes, I feel so lucky to have this in our family. The dogs are certainly one of my favourite things about this branch – there’s at least another two photos with two different dogs in. I’d love to read a post on the ancestral dogs!
I’m glad you’ve managed to locate information from family bibles. Perhaps you could start your own?