Sharing Saturday - Hauser Family Bible Pages

I am going to try to post hidden treasures that have been donated to the Lake Havasu Genealogical Society but because of the format they received them, are stored in bank boxes in the back of the library. 

Having a bible with your ancestors’ information on it is a treasure that we all wish we would have. I was lucky enough to have a family bible that my mother started, but this was based on information given her and she wrote it down, or was written by her memory. It listed her, her parents and her grandparents and great-grandparents. This was a gold mine of information for me to start my search. Not all the information was accurate but much of it was correct.

So when I was asked by a local crafter if the genealogical society wanted to make copies of the genealogical information from pages of the bibles she purchased I said yes. Since she wanted the pages to make some crafts, I could not say, no that would be wrong. Instead I said, I will scan the pages and perhaps a relative of these people might find it on the internet and will get a copy. Of course having the actual pages would have been nicer, but to be honest, the pages would have been stored in a box and properly never be seen again. The society has many such treasures and I hope to dig those out and create future blogs to share those items.

The first set of bible pages were from the Hauser family. The pages she had were from destroyed bibles and they were just thrown into a box to be sold at an Estate Sale. We could tell there was more than one bible, but I could not tell where one started and the next one ended. Therefore I cannot tell you the date of the bible. It appears to me that the first page and the first entry of the second page were written at the same time by the same person. The last two entries on the second page were definitely written later with a different pen or pencil because it is much lighter than the rest.

 Transcription of Page 1:

Children of Abram and Melinda Hinkson Hauser who lived to maturity

Benjamin F          Nov 21 1839

Zachariah H         Jan 14 1840

Harriet C              Mar 4 1843

Marriage of Benjamin F & Louise Jane Wright Jan 19 1859

Children

Alice Elizabeth                   Mar 7 1861

George Elsworth               Mar 18 1864

Anna May                           May 8 1868

Arthur Benjamin                Nov 18 1870

Evelyn Louisa                     May 6 1873

Daisy                                   July 29 1877

Daisy Died                          Oct 5 1878

Godfrey Jurlrugg                              born Dec 10 1884

This page is very interesting because this might be the only record of Daisy to exist. What a find for a family to discover this child who only lived a little more than 14 months. Plus at this time, I have no idea who Godgrey Jurlrugg (not sure of the spelling) might be. Could he be a grandchild of Benjamin F & Louise Jane Wright? Perhaps he is the son of Alice who would have been 23 when Godfrey was born. There is a slight chance he is the son of Anna who would have been 16 when he was born. This would be something the family would need to research if they don’t know who Godfrey is.

Moving onto the transcription of Page 2:

Mrs M Hauser died Aug 21 1892 

at 10 oclock and 30 minutes Am

Benjamin Franklin Hauser died June 23 1922

Louisa Jane Hauser died Sep 12 1927

It appears to me that Mrs M Hauser refers to Melinda Hinkson Hauser. We don’t have a birth date for Melinda so we don’t know how old she was when she died.  We could estimate that if she was 20 years old when Benjamin was born, she would have been born abt 1819 and would be about 73 at her time of death.

The second page gives us a death date of 1922 for Benjamin and page 1 gives us his birth date of 1839 and thus he was 83 years old when he died. We are given Louisa’s death date but we don’t know her birth date to know her age.

However, if I was going to research the people on these two pages, I would start with the most recent known fact and work my way backwards. I would go to the 1920 US Census and see if I could find them. The census would give me the ages of Benjamin and Louisa as of 1920 and based on this information I would get an estimated date of birth and could confirm Benjamin's birth and find out a clue about Louisa's birth year.

Since Benjamin and Louisa were married in 1859, I would try to find this couple in each US census between 1920 and 1859, so I would check out the 1910, 1900, 1880, 1870 and 1860 census. The 1850 census would be the one and only census record that I might find Benjamin with his parents and siblings with their names listed. Perhaps I would find other children that didn’t live to maturity but might have been alive in 1850.

Even though no places are identified on the bible pages, but I believe there is enough information to find the family unit in the US census records to figure out where their births and deaths probably occurred.