You will of course remember our post back in summertime about Jonas Theodor Meyer. (You don’t? Well, refresh your memory if you wish by looking at https://recordoffice.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/a-mystery-solved/ .) And now, we present another mystery document – and again, it’s not actually “one of ours”. It belongs to someone who attended the recent Preserving Your Past session, which you will remember was conducted by our conservation team. (You don’t remember that either? Well, it was big success, and was part of the Discovery Days festival – https://recordoffice.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/discovery-days-festival-preserving-old-photographs-and-documents/ .)
It’s from a family bible. We don’t normally accept family bibles to add to the archives, because if they have been used to record baptisms/marriages/burials, their real significance is limited to descendants of those named, rather than a wider audience of local history researchers.
This one, though, has a particular twist – entries written in German, French and English.
In some parts, it’s clear enough: for instance, I can manage enough German to read that “My dear mother entered God’s Heavenly Kingdom on 5 May 1886”, and can see that this note was made in Oxford and accompanied by the distinctly English-language abbreviation RIP. In other areas, it’s less clear. If you have the skills and the time to add to our knowledge here, please do have a look at the images and reply through the “Comments” button. We will relay anything we hear back to the owner. Thanks a lot.
If it helps to have the pages as separate images rather than a slideshow, here they are: