Bibles Chart County’s Family Tree

HAGERSTOWN, Md. —  The history of Bob and Jean Beck’s family is written in their Bible, on a few yellowed pages between the Old and New Testaments.

“Mother Beck,” it begins. “Susanna Miller was born May the 30, 1793.”

Subsequent entries cover generations of births, deaths and marriages, ending with the wedding of their daughter, Jeanne, in 1999.

This cherished handwritten record of a family is now a public treasure too. The Becks are among hundreds of area families who have had their Bible pages photocopied and placed on file at the Washington County Free Library for genealogical studies.

Genealogy experts say the project is a rare and unusually well-organized effort to create a public repository of such material. Many of the nation’s private genealogy societies also have collected such material, said Russell Henderson, spokesman for the National Genealogical Society in Arlington, Va.

“Some of those old family Bibles are better records than anything else,” he said.

In Maryland, systematic public recording of births and deaths did not exist before 1898 in counties and 1875 in the city of Baltimore.

“Frankly, I don’t know of any other project like it,” said Nancy Bramucci, director of special collections at the Maryland State Archives. “I actually thought about doing the same thing at one point because it really would be a valuable resource, but it was just more than I could do.”

The library in downtown Hagerstown has been copying family records from Bibles since 1968 and now has 400 to 500 such files. This year, the library is using a grant from a private estate to begin compiling and indexing the records.

“When this is all completed, it will be a capitulation of vital statistics from all those Bibles,” said John Frye, director of the institution’s Western Maryland Room.

Large, hardcover Bibles often contain a handful of blank middle pages for recording important family events. Those entries, along with church records of christenings, weddings and burials, can prove invaluable in documenting early Maryland life, said R.J. Rockefeller, the state archives’ director of reference services.

“If you know a woman had five children and that she died the same day as the birth of her fifth child, and from that same family Bible you know that only two of those children lived to adulthood, then you know how hard life was in early America,” he said.

Historians have long recognized the value of Bible records, but compiling them has been problematic.

“It takes some central management, which is not always possible,” Rockefeller said. “The Washington County library project is so significant because it will give an institutional framework for the project.”

Henderson said advances in digital scanner technology promise to make Bible record-keeping less cumbersome. The improvements make it practical to scan even large pages of handwritten material into electronic files, he said.

“The interesting thing about Bible records that makes them unique is that it might be the Henderson Bible, but it will have Joneses and Smiths and everybody else in it as people marry into the family,” he said.

The two Beck family Bibles list Becks, Bakers, Middlekaufs, Ellsworths--some of the most common names in the local telephone book.

“I think they’re related to everyone in the whole town,” said Jean Beck, who married into the family after moving to Hagerstown from Baltimore in 1967.

The clan included farmers, musicians, saloonkeepers, tailors and dry cleaners, as well as the builder of an early mansion, she said.

Bob Beck, a retired Hagerstown businessman whose family goes back five generations in the area, said he liked the idea of preserving the Bible records for posterity.

“We thought it was great that someone was doing that,” he said. “And we thought that if anybody was looking for it, we’d be happy to add to it.”