One of the most prized sources of family genealogical information is written material that has been passed down through the family. These types of sources often include family notes or letters. While this type of information is usually assumed to be accurate, you must always remember that it is only as good as the knowledge, memory or resource of the author who recorded it years, or even a century earlier.
We are lucky in that we have at least three of these types of informational sources that are specific to our family and give information on earlier generations on our family tree. They include handwritten pages in the family bible known as the Hale Bible; notes that were recorded in a journal by Deacon David W Scribner probably in the late 1800’s; and a family genealogy document about the Hall family that was prepared specifically for Virginia Augusta Hale Scribner by Harry M Chapman in 1897.
P M Hale Bible
– The bible known in our family as the Hale Bible was published in New York in
1846. It is very large and heavy and is
inscribed inside with the text, “a sacred token from Philip M Hale to Mary Ann
B Hale”. Philip and Mary were married
in 1835 however the bible would have been purchased sometime between 1846 and
1860. It has now been passed down in our
family for four generations.
As in many large bibles, the Hale Bible has pages for recording births, marriages and deaths, and information has been added on many of those pages.
Because I have an original document signed by Philip M Hale, I can see that the marriage information in the bible for Philip M Hale and Mary Ann B Dickinson was actually written by Philip M Hale. The Hale family bible also includes a few cherished items that were kept in the bible such as the 1876 marriage certificate for David A Scribner & Virginia A Hale.
Also included in the bible are a couple of obituary news clippings and a photo. There is a newspaper obituary for Mary A B Dickinson Hale (the wife of P M Hale) who died in 1880; the obituary for one of her sons, David D Hale, who died in 1894; and a photo that is noted on the back as “Sis Mary”. I believe the photo is of Mary Rogers Summerville Hale who died in 1866 at the age of 29 years, and that it was labeled as “Sis Mary” by Virginia Augusta Hale Scribner.
One of the types of genealogical documents mentioned above is handwritten recordings of family records. There is a sheet that is tucked into the Hale Bible that is a page of notes about the Rogers family. The mother of the original owner of the bible, Mary A B Dickinson Hale, was a Rogers. Mary’s grandparents were Capt John Rogers and Hannah Smith, and the topic of my previous blog post. They were married in 1782.
Journal written by Deacon David W Scribner
– An accounting that was included in a personal journal written by Deacon David
W Scribner was seven pages of detailed information beginning with a page titled
“Family Record of My Great Grandfather’s Children”. David W Scribner lived until 1890 and died at
94 years of age, so we know that he wrote down this family information in his
journal in the 1800’s. David’s great
grandfather was Edward Scribner (1696-1756), and David began his record with the
list of that Edward’s children.
The compiled John Hall & Mary Parker of Maryland genealogy – One early genealogy document specific to our family is a family tree that was prepared for Virginia A Hale Scribner in 1897. It tracked her Hale family back to early colonial years and the arrival of John Hall (1624 – 1660) in America.
John Hall arrived from England in 1640, and during his life he became a substantial land owner in the Chesapeake Bay area [see the January 15, 2021 blog, Legacy of Enslavement]. His son, also named John Hall (1658 – 1737) held the important offices of High Sheriff of Baltimore County in 1692, and the governmental offices of a Deputy Commissioner. He was also a delegate to the General Assembly of Maryland from Baltimore County.
The genealogy, titled the “Descendants of John Hall and Mary Parker of Maryland” written by Harry M Chapman, takes Virginia’s ancestry back to both of those early ancestors.
There was a great deal of interest in the early 1900’s in heraldry groups. Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants are examples of such groups. Virginia was a long-time member of a group called the Kin of Colonials, and she was also a member of the Society of Colonial Daughters of the Seventeenth Century. To join such groups Virginia needed to provide something that traced her line back to colonial times.
Harry M Chapman prepared the Hall family genealogy for Virginia with the purpose of documenting her line for membership in lineage societies. The document is comprised of fifteen legal-sized handwritten pages covering eight generations beginning with John Hall & Mary Parker and ending with Virginia Augusta Hale Scribner.
Harry Melville Chapman, the author of the genealogy, was also a distant cousin to Virginia. Both Virginia and Harry were great grandchildren of Aquila Hall & Ann Tolley Hall. Harry may have already gathered much of the information on the Hall family for his own interests and membership in lineage societies, as I have found that he was a member of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Please remember when working with most documents, you should always double check with other sources, if available, as not everything written down is necessarily correct. I have worked with Chapman’s Hall genealogy document quite a bit in doing my own research over the years, and I have discovered a few errors. I found one entry that gave a man’s marriage date that was only twelve years after his birth date, thus the marriage date or birth date, or both, are incorrect. I also discovered that Mr. Chapman had incorrectly noted Virginia’s 2nd & 3rd great grandparents. The correct lineage is actually only slightly different and through siblings in the same Hall family line, thus the corrected path still goes back to John Hall and Mary Parker, just not exactly on the route as noted in Chapman’s family tree.
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Key Individuals:
Philip Moore Hale (1807 – 1870)
Mary Ann Brown Dickinson Hale (1816 – 1880)
Captain John Rogers (1760 – 1796)
Hannah Smith Rogers (1760 – 1845)
Deacon David Scribner (1795 – 1890)
Islethera Howland Scribner (1802 – 1843)
Capt David Alba Scribner (1840 – 1911)
Virginia Augusta Hale Scribner (1848 – 1940)
Notes:
1) It is possible that you can find records owned by others that intersect your family line and take you to earlier generations. I found a DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) document that indicated that DAR had at one time reviewed and accepted the family bible records for Aquila Hall and Ann Tolley Hall, my 4th great grandparents. In 2010, I wrote to the DAR office in Washington D.C. and requested a copy of that document. In response, the DAR sent me copy from their files of a 1939 typed transcription of entries that were said to have been written in a bible that had originally belonged to Aquila and Ann Hall. Aquila and Ann were both born in the mid-1700’s in Baltimore County. The bible that the 1939 DAR transcription was taken from was at that time owned by Harry Melville Chapman who died in 1946. I wonder who holds that Hall family bible today?
2) Other sources that have proven helpful are published genealogies. I have been able to find links for individuals in our family tree in the following genealogy books: The Book of Snedekers, A Simple Outline of the Descendants of Focke Jansz of the Netherlands, The Wentworth Genealogy, The Morrisettes of North Carolina, James Rogers of New London CT, A Genealogy of the Ricker Family and the Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England. You simply need to determine where our tree links into the surname genealogy, usually by marriage.
And last, there are printed materials that are not specifically genealogies that can also be useful in digging out family information. One that comes to mind is the The Diary Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut 1711 – 1758. If you enjoy writing, you might want to consider starting your own personal diary or journal, and possibly decades or centuries from now it will be prized by one of your descendants as a tale of your time in history!
3) Be aware that simply because something was printed in a book or even handwritten in a bible, journal or on a piece of paper, that doesn’t necessarily make it true and accurate. A historian or researcher will always want to find verification documentation whenever possible.
– Jane Scribner McCrary
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