Finding Family Heirlooms & Artifacts with eBay

It’s been years since I looked at eBay to find family heirlooms and artifacts. In the past, I have made some spectacular family history finds.

For example, I once found an old family letter written by Jonathan Huse (1767-1853) to his mother, and an 1813 sampler created by his daughter Sarah Araline Huse (1807-1825) when she was only 6 years old.

Photo: sampler by Sarah Araline Huse, 1813. Source: Huse Family Papers.

Wow—if the family has lost track of some of its treasured heirlooms, eBay is a good place to find them again.

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My Recent eBay Family Find

Looking at eBay last week, I spotted this old family Bible first owned by William Richmond (1820-1871).

Photo: family Bible first owned by William Richmond. Source: eBay.

The eBay seller described this Bible as:

Cover is well worn and torn.
A few pages are loose, most still intact.
Pages have spots throughout.
This is a family Bible which belonged to the William Richmond (1820-1871) family.
Bible has handwritten pages of marriages, births and deaths.
Also includes two typed pages detailing history written in the Bible as well as a brief family history dating back to 1040.

OK—these details, along with close-up photos of some of the Bible’s pages shown in the seller’s eBay posting, were encouraging. I didn’t have “William P. Richmond (1820-1871)” in my family tree, but there is a Richmond line there—and based on the evidence provided by this online auction, it sure looked like he is a relative.

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Did this Heirloom Belong to My Ancestor?

I dug a little further on the large family tree sites FamilySearch and Ancestry, to see what more information they had on William Richmond and the other family members that were named in the close-up photos that the eBay seller had included in his posting.

These people were not included in either family tree site.

That really got my attention.

So—I didn’t have this family in my tree and it was not in the two large online tree sites. Hmm…

I poked a little further and decided this could be a good find for us—the family Bible of a previously undocumented family—that could be part of my family tree.

I was for many years the editor of the Richmond Family News Journal (1972-), a family history publication. So I had more than a passing interest in this Bible and the family records it contains. Even if this was not part of my Richmond line, I wanted the information because I like to document all Richmond family lines to assist everyone working on their family history.

So—I decided to buy this Bible on eBay.

My bid won and I received the news that the family Bible had already been shipped and that I should receive it soon.

To Be Continued…

When I do, I will report on what genealogy gems I find in the Bible in my upcoming posts.

Have you ever found old family heirlooms, documents and papers on eBay? If so, what types of artifacts have you found?

Please let us know.