DAR - Family Bible Records to the Rescue

We have been looking for a marriage record for a set of great grandparents for...a long time. This was the first task my sister gave to me when I went to Salt Lake City with Kristin for RootsTech in 2013.  I was brand new to genealogy–it was Kristin’s hobby–and I asked my sister for some goals. She gave me the goal of finding documents that had eluded her. In hind sight, this was perhaps not the best way to begin learning genealogy techniques.

Her first brick wall was fo find a marriage record from Indiana in the 1870’s, and the second a birth record from New Mexico in 1881. There are good reasons that she has been unable to find anything.

Kristin recently went to Washington, D.C. for a college room-mates reunion and planned to spend a couple of days afterward at the National Archives and at the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Library. In preparing for the trip, I did a little work on the DAR website and pulled down a couple of relevant DAR applications that referenced family bible records extensively. I suggested that she try to find some family bible records. She did. She found a family bible record in the Genealogical Records Committee Collection that is not part of any of the applications that I retrieved, but which was part of a collection scanned and indexed by a DAR member in South Texas in the 1980’s. It has much of the information that we have been chasing and opened up a new line of research.

Kristin’s visit to the National Archive provided a treasure trove of Civil War service records, but that is her blog entry.