The case started as cases normally do, with me selecting a rescue prospect. Marilyn Traylor Syx’s submission about an 11-pound family Bible caught my eye immediately:
I came into possession of this Bible when my aunt died in 1990 at age 95. The beautiful pages in the middle start off with the marriage of former slaves Green Hawk and his wife, Louvenia, in August of 1864, and include about five pages of births, marriages, and deaths.…
Wow. A Bible that had been owned by former slaves.
Not something you see every day. Marilyn went on to explain that she had located someone from the family doing research online about five years ago and had offered to return the Bible for the cost of shipping. After three and a half years of sporadic exchanges, the family member still had not agreed to pay for the shipping (approximately $60)—a signal to Marilyn that perhaps he wasn’t the right custodian for this treasure. As she put it, she would have mortgaged her home if she found herself in the same situation. So Marilyn instead sent digital images of the family pages and held on to the Bible until she had time to find other family members.
I thought that was a fair compromise on her part. She had openly shared information, but held back the Bible itself to make sure it would go to welcoming hands. Though it hasn’t happened to me yet that I’m aware of, another “rescuer” I know of who focuses specifically on Bibles has seen two of the ones she’s rescued appear for sale on eBay. It’s wise to be careful.
Marilyn went on to explain:
I’ve become attached to this as if I was entrusted to find its people. Now that I’ve had more time to reflect on the matter, I think it really belongs to Mary Frances Hawk Thrasher’s family, as the last entry in it is for her death. I can only surmise that my aunt came by this Bible when she moved into the old farmhouse in 1947, as this is the date for Mary Thrasher’s death. Since Green and Louvenia were slaves, I’m assuming that the Hawks are African-American and my aunt and I are not.
Usually my task is to find any interested and responsible descendant, rather than a specific one, but I’d give it a try.
It was easy to get my bearings on this case because there is quite a bit of the family tree online, but what puzzled me was how the Bible of a family from Georgia—as all the available information made clear—wound up in a farmhouse in Ohio.
For this reason, I started my research with Marilyn’s aunt who had passed away in the early 1990s. Both her Social Security Death Index and Ohio Death Index entries revealed that she had died in the Dayton, Ohio, area. The logical next step was to look for Hawk family members in the same area.
Playing with the online Ohio death certificates available through the FamilySearch beta site <http://labs. familysearch.org/>, I explored to see if I could pick up the
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