20 Strange Things Families Secretly Hid Inside The Bible

In the Prohibition era, a few owners took the plunge and used a knife on their Bible to hide valuables. They glued the edges of all the pages together, then carved out the inside to create a cavity that could conceal items. Flasks of alcohol, loose bills people didn’t want on record, and even a small handgun were hidden in such compartments. No one, the owners assumed, would ever look for anything inside a holy book. You can still see examples of such modifications today in exhibits like the Mob Museum.

Free Blacks and freed slaves in the Antebellum South had to carry documentation proving they were legally free, because without it they could be seized if stopped by a slavecatcher or other authorities. Families often placed their manumission certificates or freedom papers within large family Bibles, which were not likely to be searched, burned, or stolen. You can see examples at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, soldiers sometimes carried small New Testaments in their breast pockets, and occasionally one slowed or deflected an incoming round. Their family Bibles, being much larger, remained in the house on the parlor table. The veteran who made it home brought back the bullet or bit of shrapnel and dropped it into the family Bible, preserving it as a souvenir of having lived to tell about it.

In Europe and America, sometimes a baby was born with a thin piece of tissue called a caul on its head, and such children were considered lucky and protected against drowning. The caul was dried and wrapped in paper or cloth, then slipped into the Bible beside the entry where the child’s birth had been recorded. This custom was a local superstition associated with the Bible as a home book, not a church sacrament.

Parents and chaperones kept a close eye on the courtship process in Victorian and Edwardian homes, making it difficult for young people to have any privacy. Consequently, love notes and love letters were hidden within a family Bible, where young lovers arranged clandestine trysts. Anyone holding a Bible was usually assumed to be reading piously, thus making a Bible the least suspected place in the house to keep forbidden romance alive.

Back in the hills of rural Appalachia and the South, people would save the snakeskin that had been left behind in their yards, put it between the pages of books (including the family Bible), wait until it dried, then make poultices out of it for sore muscles, or store it as good luck charms. This was folk medicine and folk superstition, not something any church ever endorsed or mandated.

Prior to the advent of affordable photography, the most common souvenir of a loved one found pressed within the pages of a family Bible was a lock of hair, perhaps tied with silk thread or carefully tucked into a folded piece of paper. It was hair taken at an infant’s first haircut, when a young man departed for war, at a wedding, or following a death. Since hair does not decay, the Bible’s thick and dry leaves preserved it well, a tangible remnant of a person the family refused to let slip away.

Flowers from wreaths, caskets, or grave mounds were often pressed between the heavy leaves of the Bible during the Victorian and Edwardian periods in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Typically, they were located alongside the date of the person’s death in the genealogical record of the family Bible.

During hard times, when crops failed, or there was widespread unemployment or depression in the 19th and early 20th century, the working classes would pawn their tools and household goods for quick cash. They were given a paper ticket, which was the only proof they needed to redeem the goods. These pawn tickets, along with other bills and IOUs, were kept in the family Bible should they ever need them again.

After a bank panic or the Civil War, the notes of a bankrupt state bank or the Confederate States of America could instantly become worthless. Rather than throw them away, however, some people tucked Confederate bills and other bank notes into their Bibles as souvenirs from the war, or maybe because they believed that at some point the money would once again be good. In general, only non-circulating currency was inserted into the pages; few people actually intended to spend the cash.

When photography came into fashion in the 1830s, there were no places to store a family’s silhouette cutouts, tintypes, and daguerreotypes, as photo albums had not been commercially produced at that time. The dark, smooth pages of the Bible kept the silver photos and paper cutouts safe from light damage and scratches. By the late 19th century, some publishers even started binding cardstock photo pages directly into large family Bibles.

A four-leaf clover was a sign of good fortune in 19th- and early 20th-century life, but those slender leaves would shrivel and dry up within hours of picking. Thus, the finder would press them between the tight, dry pages of a Bible, and their shape and green hue would be preserved for years, sometimes decades, to keep their luck in place long after they’d been discovered.

In the 19th century, amateur natural history collecting was a popular pastime in Britain and North America. Hobbyists would catch butterflies, moths, beetles, and leaves in order to study them or display them in their homes. They pressed their specimens between the heavy pages of books, including family Bibles, using the books’ weight to flatten out their delicate wings and draw the moisture out into the dry paper. Their families’ thickest book doubled as a naturalist’s tool.

From the 1700s through the early 1900s, families in rural areas didn’t have direct access to a doctor or pharmacy, so they relied on the medicine that their family caregivers shared with them. They often jotted down the recipes for herbal teas, cough syrup, wound salves, and fever poultices on a piece of paper, then placed them in the family Bible.

Between the 18th century and the mid-20th century, women sometimes took on a family’s archival role by snipping bits of important clothing: silk wedding dresses, lace baptismal dresses, military uniforms, burial shrouds. The fabric was pressed into a Bible, which kept the cloth safe from light and insects in its dark, tightly closed interior. A piece of fabric sat next to the written history of that life-changing moment.

During the 1800s and into the early 1900s, family members clipped obituaries, wedding announcements, and other notable items from local newspapers and placed them between Bible pages. This gave another layer of published information to support their written birth, marriage, and death records, which were often recorded in the genealogy section of the Bible.

With fireproof safes and country banks still in their infancy in 18th- and 19th-century North America, landowners had very few good places to store original land deeds, property records, government land grants, and even official survey maps. So the family Bible, massive and always in plain sight on the parlor table, became the place where they kept these critical documents, since it was the item least likely to be forgotten in an emergency or left behind when they moved.

It was a common practice in the 18th to early 20th centuries for heads of household to hide their will inside their family Bible, ensuring it would be found as soon as the family opened the book to record a death in the genealogy section. According to historians of wills, putting your will with the Bible was also intended to add some sort of sacredness to it, making it less likely that heirs would fight over it or burn it.

Following the Civil War, the First World War, and the Second World War, many veterans and their relatives tucked discharge certificates, enlistment documents, and draft registration cards into the pages of their family Bibles. These documents were necessary to make claims on pension, land, and medical benefits long after the war was over. So the Bible kept a soldier’s paper trail just as safe at home as it had been fragile overseas.

European immigrants to the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem, carried back a packet of dirt from the town they left or from the holy sites they visited. The packets were put inside the family Bible. For many things, the banks and the law have largely taken the place of the Bible, but not this!

This content was created with the help of AI.