ABSTRACT
Descent was not as important as recording their own, and their families' events: births, marriages, deaths, schooling, illnesses and accomplishments. Similarly, the selection of American family bibles covering the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show families' efforts to record all family members and all important events. The combination of multiple familial roles – instead of a distillation of familial prominence – typified the middling sort's efforts at family and genealogical record keeping. In some ways, these documents reveal a genealogical sensibility more about the future – recording descendants' birth, marriages and schooling – than it was about the illustrious past.
