Missing a piece of your family history?  The Tennessee Society Daughters of the American Revolution is undertaking a historic preservation project to photograph recorded Bible pages from Bibles published before 1930.

If you have a Family Bible containing family recordings of births, deaths, and marriages the Tennessee DAR would like to photograph these for a published volume/DVD of Bibles from across the state of Tennessee.  The volume/DVD will be available in local libraries when the project is complete. This is an opportunity to include your family records in a project to preserve our family histories.  If you possess a Bible published in 1930 or before and would be willing to have the Bible photographed for this project, please attend one of the sessions listed below. Participating in this project means your Bible records are preserved for future generations.

There is no charge for participating, and you will receive a CD containing the digital pictures of your Bible. These digital pictures are easily shared with others who may want to see your Bible, while keeping your Bible safe in your possession.

The Clinch Bend Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution is currently scheduled to photograph Bibles at the following times and places:

March 15, 2008 Saturday, St. Stephens Episcopal Church, email me at BibleProjectTN@yahoo.com  for an appointment time.

March 26, 2008, Wednesday- Campbell County Historical Society office, 235 East Central Ave., (between stoplights 8 and 9), LaFollette, Tennessee, 10 AM – 1 PM. We are working with the Campbell County Historical Society.

March 27, 2008, Thursday- Clinton Public Library, 118 South Hicks Street,
Clinton, Tennessee, 6:00 PM -7:45 PM. We are working with the Pellissippi Genealogical and Historical Society.

April 5, 2008, Saturday- In the basement of the Wartburg Public Library, 514 Spring St, Wartburg, Tennessee, 12 noon to 3 PM. We are working with the Morgan County Genealogical and Historical Society.

If you would like to schedule a photography session for your organization, please contact me at BibleProjectTN@yahoo.com. There is no charge to you, your organization, or the participants.

Update on the March 2 event at the Oak Ridge Library- we photographed 16 Bibles. The earliest publication date was 1799. The geographic regions covered by the data entries covered many states. The average time it took to photograph a Bible was 15 minutes. The Bible owners came from as far away as Seymour, Tennessee.

Update on the March 15 and March 26 events- The Campbell County Historical Society did a wonderful job of letting the public know we were coming and we photographed 22 more Bibles! The earliest recorded date entered in a Bible from the March 15 and March 26 events was 1732!

Update on March 27 event- The Pellissippi Genealogical and Historical Society (PGHS) included us in their meeting, and brought their Bibles for us to photograph. In addition to PGHS members, the public also attended and we photographed 18 more Bibles. There were more photographs and letters included in the Bibles we saw today. I have not finished reading all the Bible files yet, so check back later for more information on the Bibles from this session.

I will be creating an online database of surnames soon so check back for more updates. I am still receiving emails from as far away Texas, so the word is spreading. If you want your family Bible included in this historic project please attend one of the events, or email me so I can find an event near you.

Update on April 5 event- we only had three Bibles photographed, but they were lovely ones. A member of another genealogical association asked us to photograph Bible's in their area, so check back for more events.

Link to Courier News article, from newspaper in Clinton, Tennessee. The article was written by Johanne Jean-Jacques.

We have now photographed 59 Bibles, and hope to do more before the end of April when we start the next phase of the project, transcribing what we have photographed.

Future Historical Preservation Work- In order to provide a frame of reference for the names we are transcribing, I am searching census records to see if I can develop leads on geographical locations for each Bible entry. This information will not be on the DVD published by the DAR because we can only publish exactly what we have photographed. The attempt to verify or establish possible locations for each Bible entry is being done by me only to help further family research opportunities. I hope to work with the local genealogical associations in researching each Bible entry once the DVD is published and available in local libraries.