I was looking up something in Nehemiah this morning, and grabbed a Bible that I don't normally use, which I've had for a very long time; it is a 1929 American Standard Version published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, and has the written inscription,
Presented to Mr. & Mrs. White
by Harrisburg Christian Church
December 1, 1949
I don't know these people, although the Harrisburg Christian Church was perhaps a church in Harrisburg, SD, for reasons that become obvious below (I could find no church of that name currently in Harrisburg, SD). In any case, the reason I record this information is that as I was looking up the passage, a little tiny clipping of an obituary fell out. The obituary:
Zipporah Huntley was born in New Lyme, Ashtabula Co., Ohio, Jnne, 3rd, 1825. She was married to F. W. Rice, Jan. 17th, 1850; this union was blessed with three children--two sons and one daughter. She was for many years a devoted member of the Congregational church. She fell asleep in Jesus Oct 22nd, 1912, leaving one son, one daughter and eight grandchildren. Her husband preceded her in death by four years. In the Father's house she awaits the home coming of her loved ones.
(The 'Jnne' for June is in the original.) There is no indication of what newspaper is the source of the clipping.* I don't know either Zipporah Huntley or F. W. Rice, either.
I cannot remember how the Bible came to me; I would have said that it was probably from my grandparents' library, and thus either from my grandmother or grandfather, but for all I can be sure, I may have picked it up in some free book bin or at a used book sale somewhere. Do I have any familial connection at all with Mr. & Mrs. White, or were they friends of family, or are they simply strangers? I do not know. What connection did they have with Zipporah Huntley or F. W. Rice? I do not know. It's entirely a mystery. And yet here I was this morning somehow connected, in some unknown way, with Zipporah Huntley who died in 1912.
Online, there is some limited information about Zipporah Huntley, although none that I could find about her husband; she has an Ancestry.com entry, which has very limited, tentative information, saying that she was born June 1826 in Ohio or Connecticut and died in Lake Preston, South Dakota on October 22, 1912. It gives her parents as Selden Huntley and Louisa Peck, and gives her children's names as Flora Estella Rice and Sherman E. Rice. The South Dakota place of death is one possible reason to suspect that I just picked up the Bible somewhere; I have a few books that were picked up that way in South Dakota.
So for all I know the Bible may be in my hands due entirely to the chance event of my rescuing a Bible from a free book bin. But Zipporah Huntley lived and had a family and friends and died in 1912; a church gifted a Bible to a couple in 1949; and at some point, someone put the tiny clipping of the 1912 obituary into that 1949 Bible; and somehow or another that Bible happened to come into my hands. The Bible was an important enough gift to be formally inscribed; the obituary was important enough to somebody to keep in a Bible and carefully preserve, even to the point of ending up in a Bible that did not exist when the obituary was written. And whoever Zipporah Huntley was, someone at least somewhere found her in their family tree in order to put up a brief record about her on the internet. Of such things are most human connections made. And so I put up this record of an obituary clipping found in a Bible, partly to have it in case I ever discover more about it; partly because that obituary clipping will eventually completely disappear, however important it might have been, and it seems a sort of respect, for someone having considered it so important, to reduce the chances of that happening any time soon; and partly so that the information will be available online if anyone, hunting down some genealogical connection, tries to find information about Zipporah Huntley in the future. And also it serves as a reminder that we are connected to other people in many ways. These ways are mostly tenuous, but they are very many, and make up the greater part of what binds the human race together.
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* Since it could be relevant at some future date to determining the source of the obituary, I will note that the reverse of the clipping looks like it is a bit about 'Poor Nobles of Italy' and mentions some medieval castle in a hill town in Central Italy that was sold to an Englishman for $195.
