Family Bibles as a Genealogy Resource

Family Bibles during the Victorian era often included extra pages at the end known as flyleaves. Families used these to record births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths. These records are especially valuable to genealogists today.

Family Bibles were also known as family record books, remembrance books, or registers. They became treasured heirlooms, frequently passed down through generations, sometimes as wedding gifts.

Before the introduction of formal civil registration for births, marriages, and deaths, these records could even serve as legal proof for matters like land ownership, inheritance rights, or pension claims.

Family Bibles – History Meets Art

England and America have a long tradition of keeping such records. Family Bibles would often be beautifully printed and bound. They would include a Book of Common Prayer, genealogy of the descent from Adam, and the Apocrypha.

Other embellishments included illustrations, engravings and maps. Some featured the Metric Psalter – a metrical translation of the Book of Psalms, meant to be sung as hymns.

Using Family Bibles for Genealogy

Your Family Bible, can be a treasure trove of information for family history research. This article by the genealogist Gena Philibert-Ortega offers insights into this.

Even if you don’t have a family Bible, below are two high resolution scans of a Family Record that you may print and use.

You can find many more beautiful vintage designs here (Not all are in high resolution).

Scanning Family Bibles, Photos and Albums

Family records in Bibles have given way to civil records and photo albums. From printed photos, we have moved on to digital photo libraries. Handwritten notes behind printed photos can now be saved as metadata embedded in digital pictures.

If you haven’t fully embraced these changes yet, you should – it’s easier than you think.

You don’t need an expensive flatbed scanner or complicated software for digitizing and cropping old photos. Any digital camera, basic scanner or smartphone can capture high-resolution “photos of photos”. These will preserve faded, yellowing old photos and make them shareable.

When scanning photos or albums, two tasks require a lot of effort: Cropping the scans, and adding metadata. You can speed up scanning by capturing 3-4 photos or an entire album page at a time, but cropping takes time. As for metadata, at the very least you should add creation dates, and if possible also locations and short description.

Simplifying Cropping and Metadata Editing

The Mac app SnipTag crops up to a hundred scanned photos with one click. It also lets you add digital labels – dates, descriptions, locations and more – by typing or dictating. All this is invisibly embedded into your photos as metadata, and “travels” with the photos when you export or share them. It is also added to photos as visible captions – the modern day equivalent of writing behind photos!

SnipTag is an inexpensive but indispensable tool for genealogists and family historians. Find more details here on Apple’s Mac App Store.