Finding the family bible was a bit of luck followed by a few weeks' detective work, followed by a bit more luck.
In 1962 there was an article in the Lancashire Evening Post written by local historian Kathleen Eyre on one Sep Smith, the son of Henry Smith and Zillah Steventon. That article gave a list of all Sep's siblings drawn from a family bible, and all his mother's siblings too.
We had a cutting of that article in one of my dad's cuttings files but nobody had ever heard of there being a family bible. There was some memory of Sep having been interviewed by Kathleen Eyre, so we assumed that he must have had the bible and when he died it was chucked away with all his other junk.
Then one day, I was browsing through the catalogues of the Lancashire Records Office, and happened to find a reference to Kathleen Eyre - it turned out that when she died all her papers had been deposited there. So I thought there might be notes from her meetings with Sep. I never did find those, and unfortunately the deposit has never been catalogued. But after weeks and weeks of ploughing through box after box of papers, albums of clippings, albums of postcards and all sorts of stuff she'd collected over the years, I came across a clipping of the article we already had a copy of. Then on the next page, she'd kept all the correspondence relating to it. Cutting a long story a bit shorter, it transpired that following a chance meeting she'd borrowed the bible off a Smith cousin.
In separate researches, I knew about this cousin, but had no contact details for her, and anyway she was likely to be dead now. But I'd made contact with another cousin on the Smith side and had been keeping him informed, and he was in touch with a child of the cousin who'd loaned the bible to Kathleen Eyre. He got in touch, and was told the bible had been thrown away after it had completely disintegrated ... but the pages relating to family history had been kept. There are two sets, one from a much older bible, presumably pasted into the newer bible in the later 19th century, or in the 20th century. This is a very battered page with some barely legible scrawl on both sides listing George & Ann Stevanton (sic) and their children. The other more recent pages, from a bible with pre-printed pages for a "family register" lists the births, marriages and deaths of Henry & Zillah Smith. The deaths were maintained up till 1935.
I've not seen the original, only scans, and unfortunately by the time I'd got them, they only really confirmed what I'd already discovered following the leads given in the Lancs Evening Post article. Also in Kathleen Eyre's papers were a few of Sep's election posters (he kept trying to stand as a councillor in Blackpool) which are hilarious.
