I met Gloria Duncan
about a month ago when she came to church one Sunday while visiting her
daughter Andrea Matthews (the subject of a BC post on February 21—Andrea is a
pediatric pharmacist) and her son Cameron. Andrea of course knew about my
interest in writing and mentioned that her mom was a writer, and that she had
produced a genealogical study of their family.
When I talked to Mrs.
Duncan, her enthusiasm for her writing and for research into her ancestors was
evident. She spoke of using Bibles to find information about forbears, which
had never occurred to me but made perfect sense.
I have done a little with
genealogical research, which means I sat down with Ancestry.com one day and in
an hour found out that a line of descent on my mother’s side went back to an
indentured servant who came to the Jamestown area in 1640. His grandson was
a captain in the Virginia militia during the Revolution.
Mrs. Duncan by way of
contrast had invested countless hours, traveled thousands of miles and met
dozens of people doing her research, resulting in a beautiful book that was
truly a labor of love. I have cut in some image of several representative pages
of the book at the end of this post. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Mrs. Duncan wrote me in
more detail about her use of Bibles for research.
Since
you are interested in my reliance on Bible records I thought I would tell you
about what resulted from some Bible pages.
My husband’s sister, Joyce, had done some
family genealogy work in the 1970’s.
During that time she had copied some Bible pages that their uncle had
copied from a Bible that was in the family.
She didn’t remember who had the Bible at the time and the uncle has
died, so I had no idea where the pages had come from. One page of notes Joyce had from her uncle
mentioned that “Sammy says this is all of the Bible pages.” I tried and tried to find out who Sammy
was…there were several Samuels in the family…but could not locate who would
have had the Bible.
In collaborating with another researcher of
the family in Texas, I mentioned I had some pages that had come from a Duncan
Bible. She had been researching about
eighteen years and had not heard of the Bible.
As it turned out, she had been looking all those years for when my
husband Joel’s great-great grandfather,
Browning Duncan, died. The Bible page
had his death date. I also had the birth
and death of a child whose lone tombstone was in
Tennessee that we were then able to identify.
The children of his great grandfather were also unknown until we looked
at the Bible pages. About four of the
five girls had died before adulthood and were unknown to the present
families. So the Bible pages turned out
to be the ONLY source for this data. The
other researcher found out that the only thing any of her contacts knew about
the Bible was that supposedly it had survived a tornado in Oklahoma.
Just
this February when Joel and I were in California, I went through all the old
notes of his sister’s again and found a manila envelope from the same uncle who
had copied the Bible pages and just written on the envelope, but not as an
address, was the name Sammy Duncan, Mulhall, Oklahoma. I felt sure that I had discovered the Sammy
who had had the Bible.
The white pages on the Internet confirmed the existence of a Sammy Duncan in that town and gave a phone number for him. When we contacted him it was indeed the Duncan in possession of the old Bible and it had survived a tornado and was in very fragile condition. I actually had copies already of all the pertinent pages for genealogy, but it was so gratifying to know where it was and who had it. It also opened up another branch of the family and Joel discovered more second cousins he knew nothing about. One is the State Music Director for Georgia Baptists, Jon Duncan.
What an incredible story! Thanks to Gloria Duncan for sharing with us.
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| The title page of Gloria's book |
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| First page |
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| Family page |
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