{"id":884,"date":"2012-05-10T18:42:03","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T18:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.genealogybank.com\/?p=884"},"modified":"2017-11-20T13:57:24","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T18:57:24","slug":"family-digs-up-old-grave-to-find-family-bible-and-claim-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/family-digs-up-old-grave-to-find-family-bible-and-claim-fortune.html","title":{"rendered":"Family Digs Up Old Grave to Find Family Bible and Claim Fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past 50 years I have heard of many ways to source and document our ancestors.<\/p>\n

Genealogists will \u201cdig up\u201d all types of sources but the solution that the Phillips family used has to be the most unusual.<\/p>\n

I recently came across this, the most unusual genealogy sourcing story I have ever heard of. I found it in the Plain Dealer<\/em> (Cleveland, Ohio), 15 April 1891, page 1.<\/p>\n

\"Records<\/a>
Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 15 April 1891, page 1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1891 the Phillips literally dug up their Family Bible that had been buried in the grave of a niece 25 years earlier.<\/p>\n

This unusual story begins with Isaac Phillips (1766-1834), who was born in Easton, Massachusetts. He left his hometown in 1813 and moved to the South where he was \u201cengaged in the slave trade and accumulated an enormous fortune.\u201d\u00a0 He kept his money\u2014over $5 million at the time\u2014at the Manhattan Bank of New York.<\/p>\n

Isaac died in 1834, \u201chis wife and only child having previously died.\u201d For the next 70 years his relatives tried to prove their right to the fortune Isaac left behind. They had a lot of difficulty in tracking and documenting their genealogy and finally determined that the Family Bible had the answers.<\/p>\n

But there was a problem: the Family Bible was buried in a cemetery. It seems that it was buried in the casket along with Isaac\u2019s niece Susana Phillips, who died 4 June 1866.<\/p>\n

The money was still safely in the bank, accumulating interest all the while. It was now worth more than $6 million\u2014so the family secured permission to exhume Susana\u2019s body and remove the Family Bible.<\/p>\n

When they opened the grave the Family Bible was found and, although a little decayed, the family history \u201crecord [was] still perfectly legible\u201d and gave them the information they needed to prove their genealogical connection and claim the family fortune.<\/p>\n

Moral of the story: Keep an accurate and complete family history and preserve your documentation, like Family Bibles, that prove the record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article about the Phillips family in 1891 digging up a Family Bible that had been buried in the grave of a niece 25 years earlier to claim a fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12557],"tags":[2585,943,12,2020],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genealogy-stories","tag-cemeteries","tag-family-bibles","tag-genealogy","tag-newspaper-archives"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/illustration-0510-2012-featured-graphic-grave.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genealogybank.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}