Show 1 seursm sewr T THE FAMILY BIBLE MISSED Individual Records Are No Longer Kept I with Exactness Tho family Hlhlo with Its genealogical genealog-ical record served a useful purpose fn Its day suld tho librarian and I dont see that with all our boasted advance In civilization uo have developed de-veloped anything qulto to take Its place Of course nowadays cities and towns pride themselves on tho accuracy of their vital statistic and WI have wholo libraries of genealogical genealogi-cal worksdry enough most of them are too Hut the Individual family record such as was kept a fow gen orations ago Is very decidedly missing miss-ing and Its a pity that such Is the caseKoi Fur ono thing the list of births marriages and deaths that wore kept In tho ponderous volume of Holy Writ operated to keep the members of the family close to one another It was In a way a central point valuable val-uable far sentimental reasons as well as for reasons moro distinctly utilitarian utili-tarian As scribe succeeded scribe the family continuity wan emphasized and the entries wore significant of tho growth of a clannish feeling which Is too little In evidence at the present time There are not 1 venture ven-ture to say very many people In this year ot grace who know anything or care anything about their relatives further removed than tho degree of first couslnshlp and oven first cousins cou-sins are frequently out of mind Of course our tendencies aro responsible largely for this state of affairs but I often wish that we had reminders of our kin such as were furnished by tho family Bible of past days with their direct personal testimony amounting to messages from parents to children Whenever I seo one of these pages filled with careful entries en-tries entries made In joy and In sorrow sor-row In tho confidence of pride ot life or by tho trembling fingers of old age It seems to mo that we havo lost something in our hurried exlstenco that Is to bo regretted Wo can go to tho city or town clerk or perhaps to tho public library for Information as to our ancestry or our relatives but this Is u rather cold and formal method of procedure Certainly wo do not find In olllclal records and In hooks tho handwriting of our forebears fore-bears |