The book conservator thumbed through the pages, finding a yellowed envelope. “Look at this,” he said, handing it to me.
The envelope wasn’t sealed. I opened it to find a lock of auburn hair. The conservator stood there, smiling as he watched me stare with my mouth open. The Bible had been in my possession for almost forty years, and I’d never seen it.
And I realized I had just walked into a 160-year-old love story.
The Bible had been in my grandfather’s possession from 1920 to his death in 1952. For the next thirty years, it sat on a top shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet. As a child, I only saw what was obviously a thick book wrapped inside an old paper grocery bag and bound with fraying twine. When I asked, my father told me it was the family Bible; it had passed down to him from his father and great-grandfather. But I never held the Bible in my hands or looked through its pages until decades later.
Not long before he died in 1987, my father gave the Bible to me, still in its wrapping and still tied with that twine. Discarding the wrappings, I looked through the fragile volume. An oversized King James Version, it contained several pages of family records, written in fading ink, with recorded births dating back to 1801. The dates of births, deaths, and marriages had all been entered by the same hand; the signature on a loose page near the front cover was that of my great-grandfather, Samuel.
The Bible was in deplorable condition. It showed evidence of insect damage. Some pages were rotting away, and the binding glue had disintegrated. Acid used in the paper production process was turning the pages brown. The cover was also damaged. It wasn’t exactly what experts would call a rare book of great value.
I copied the family records by hand and later typed them to preserve them. I tossed the paper bag and twine and wrapped the Bible in acid-free paper and stored it in a cardboard conservator’s box. I was afraid it would fall apart if I handled it too much. And it sat on a closet shelf for many years, just like it had in my parents’ house.
In January 2022, my wife read an article about a book conservator near where we live in St. Louis. I contacted him and made an appointment for an assessment. He’d trained at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and he knew his stuff. He was able to tell me things about the Bible that I never could have learned on my own.
Even without a copyright or publication date, he could tell that the Bible had been printed in the 1868–1870 period. “Tens of thousands of these Bibles were printed and sold door to door,” he said. “So many men had died in the Civil War that families wanted to make sure they were remembered, and the records in the Bible were how they did it.”
As he carefully examined the pages, he found that envelope with the lock of hair in the book of Isaiah. There was no identification on the envelope. But I could figure out whose lock it was.
My great-grandfather Samuel was twenty years old at the end of the Civil War. At war’s end, he’d returned home to Pike County in southern Mississippi. Both of his older brothers had died during the conflict; so, too, had a brother-in-law, at the Battle of Shiloh. He married in 1867 when he was twenty-two. His wife, Octavia Montgomery, was a year older and born in neighboring Amite County. Samuel’s father was ailing and would die in 1873; his mother had died in 1849.
Samuel and Octavia had ten children: six girls and four boys. The first eight survived to adulthood; the last two died not long after birth. My grandfather James, born in 1879, was the youngest surviving child.
Octavia died at age forty-three. The family records in the Bible only provide names and dates. No account of Octavia’s life and death has been passed down, but ten children in sixteen years tells its own story.
The Bible was purchased by Samuel. All the entries are in his hand, the last being from the late 1890s when it seems he ran out of room, as there were no additional pages. The book conservator found the loose signature page placed at the beginning, but he determined that it originally belonged at the end. It was as if Samuel wanted to make sure people knew he had filled out the records.
Mortality rates at the time were higher for women than for men. Uncommon for the time was the fact that my great-grandfather was forty-two at the time of his wife’s death, and he never remarried. His own father had married twice. But Samuel did not.
I looked at that lock of hair, and I thought to myself, “There’s a love story here.” Ten children born over a sixteen-year period along with dutifully kept records for both his own and extended family speak to his faithfulness, both to his wife and the family. But that he kept that lock of hair and never remarried speaks to something more than that.
Samuel had been born on a plantation near the village of Johnson Station, a few miles from the town of Brookhaven. Octavia likely came from a similar family in similar circumstances. She also had quite a pedigree; she was a direct descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620 and were made famous in The Courtship of Miles Standish by Hendry Wadsworth Longfellow.
At the end of the Civil War, Samuel was twenty, the sole surviving son, and essentially head of the family, helping to manage the families of his widowed sisters as well. To say that times were uncertain would be an understatement. The plantation was either sold or confiscated for taxes. Samuel worked in the only business he knew—farming. The census records list him as a farmer from 1870 to 1910.
At some point late in life, he joined the household of a daughter who lived near Alexandria, Louisiana. He died there in 1920 at the age of seventy-five and was buried in a nearby cemetery. Octavia had been buried in Mississippi.
We have one surviving photograph of them, and it had been rather crudely doctored at some point to address damage. In the shot, taken about 1880, they both show the customary serious expressions. The photo had been given to my father’s oldest sister; on her death, her son thought it belonged to the Youngs and offered it to me.
Both the photograph and the lock of hair show me a couple who, together, faced economic and social upheaval, the loss of the world they had known, the deaths of close family members in war, military occupation during Reconstruction, and the loss of two children in childbirth. She died thirty-three years before he did, and he kept a lock of her hair in the Bible with the family records he steadfastly maintained.
Even though no one would have objected to his remarrying, he chose to remain a widower. They had been married for only twenty years, yet he remained true for another thirty-three.
I can see him opening the Bible and retrieving that lock of hair from its envelope, thinking about what they had endured together, and remembering the great and only love of his life.
The featured image is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Glynn Young wrote his first story when he was 10 – a really bad mystery having something to do with a door behind a grandfather clock and a secret cave. At 14, he discovered Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, but he secretly wanted to write James Bond stories. At 21, he became a Christian, and the verse he was given, Philippians 1:6, became the theme of his life.
Glynn received a B.A. in Journalism from LSU and a Masters in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. He spent his professional career in corporate public relations, and mostly executive speechwriting. Since 2009, he’s been an editor for Tweetspeak Poetry, writing a weekly column. Since 2011, he has published five novels in the Dancing Priest Series, the nonfiction book Poetry at Work, and the historical novel Brookhaven.
He and his wife Janet live in suburban St. Louis.
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