Since its founding in 1816, the American Bible Society has developed an extraordinary collection of bibles in most of the world’s languages. Many of the bibles in the ABS collection were once privately owned and contain family records that have not been available elsewhere.
Beginning in 1987 the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and the American Bible Society undertook to make the family records documented in these bibles accessible to researchers. NYG&B volunteers examined the ABS collection and identified 632 bibles that contained records of interest. The ABS made microfiche copies of those family records, and NYG&B volunteers developed an index of over 8,000 names that were extracted from the family information pages. The location of each name is specified as Set:Bible Number.
For each bible, we have digitized a set of pages containing the Society’s library record, the publisher and year of the bible, the printed title page, and the handwritten pages where inscriptions and life events, including births, marriages and deaths, were recorded. The families who created these records lived all over the United States and in some cases in other countries. Some of the records were written in languages other than English, and most of those have been translated.