Family Bible records are cool in many ways. First, they often record an event at the time it happened by a person who was there, frequently the person involved in the event (except for death, I suppose). Second, people generally do not type on the pages of a Family Bible, so you get to see handwriting exemplars for one or more people over time. Usually, the writer is the husband or wife, and you can figure out which is which by careful study of the handwriting for the first entry of death. [Hint: The death entry is (probably) in the hand of the surviving spouse. I say probably because of the nagging possibility that some prescient ancestor may have decided to pre-record his/her demise.] Third, they generally have pretty colorful pages, sort of illuminated manuscripts that shed light on family history.
For all of these reasons, I was very happy when Pamala Clark, a distant cousin and descendant of the Marquette Michigan Guelffs, happened upon this website or a post on a genealogy message board, and generously made available photos of pages from her Family Bible. Some of those pages might tell us a little about what the Guelff brothers were doing when they posed together, and a few other things of interest.
Mike and Mary Guelff, according to the "Marriages" page above, were married on the 22th [sic] of June 1879. We also get the bonus that "Louis and Anne Bertrand Guelff were married the 20th day of January 1918 at 8:00 a.m." Interesting time of the day to get married. Wonder if a justice of the peace was involved? This is a teaser question. Cousin Pamela has assured me that "there were no shenanigans." You can also see that the hand that begins the 1918 entry does not finish it. We see a generational transition here of the person who makes the entry, maybe a torch pass from a parent to a child.
Let's look at another record and see how we can make it talk to us, as though we were sitting in the same living room and having a chat. The "Deaths" page tells us, very succinctly, that "Mary Anna Guelff died the 24th of January 1884." Compare the script to the marriage entry and you will see it is by the same hand. Now look at the entry "Mike Guelff died March 5, 1918." What do you think? Did Mike Guelff begin the entry for the marriage of Louis and Anne in January of the same year? Did his impending death have anything to do with the time of day? Does the Marriage Certification below (probably not a page from the bible) help answer any of these questions? Maybe not, but it does give us the name of a church, St. John's in Marquette, where we will probably find quite a few more records if we contact the diocese or take a genealogical excursion to Marquette.
The Family Bible contains another page that gives us more information contemporaneously recorded. That page lists the births in the family, at least in the first generation of record keepers, and also gives greater detail on the Bertrand line of the marriage. The page is not titled "Births", as one would expect, but rather "Memoranda". The page has seen better days, as it has a yellowing tape repair. In a round about way this brings us back to the first page and the first entry above. "Peter and _____ Gray were joined in the holy bonds of Matrimony on the 6th day of July in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty nine." No mention of any other Gray appears on any other page. Who were they? What relationship do they have to the Guelff-Bertrand family?
As it turns out, probably no relationship at all. Peter Gray was probably the first owner of the bible, but did not live long enough to put it to good use, or if he did use it, then only the page for "Births" which may not have survived. Hence, the resort to the "Memoranda" section for the Guelff births and the Bertrand ancestor entries.
You may have a better explanation. If you do, please let me know. The sleuthing always improves when there is a posse in pursuit of the prize.
So we note from the "Memoranda" with the superimposed cursive "Children" that the marriage was blessed with 11 of the little rascals, one about every two years. The first, Eva, making her debut on 11 October 1880 and the last Leo Theodore on 18 May 1905. That's 25 years of hard labor, but fairly typical for the time. Remember, his brother -- the Michael Guelff married to Anna Grein who lived in Eden Valley, Minnesota -- sired 14 children for which we have records. Sibling rivalry?
I find the second birth entry interesting: "Louis Guelff born the 26th of Marz 1882." Doubtful that the entries in this hand were made by a native French speaker, so probably not by a Bertrand ancestor. So my preliminary conclusion from all of this: Michael or Michel Guelff of the Marquette Michigan branch acted as the primary record keeper. But it could be that Mary Bessing, the wife of Michel, also spoke and wrote German. So the attribution of authorship remains a working hypothesis.
I also thought it likely that all of the Bertrand entries were made by the same person, the same day, some time after 1957, the death date for Joseph Bertrand. Evidence: consistency of style, format, ink and type of pen. Cousin Pamela has confirmed that her mother, Mary Anne Guelff Peterson, faithfully recorded dates and events in their bible. She also brought to my attention that "both great grandparents [Michael and Mary Bessing] hailed from Guelph Belgium/Germany (depending on where the line was drawn that year)." Her grandmother Mary Bertrand was French by way of Canada. When she married Louis Guelff, three languages were spoken -- French and German at home and English outside the house. As Cousin Pamela tells it, "'We are American,' Grandpa would say." That three word sentence tells a powerful story of assimilation, but also a powerful story of severance from the old world and the loss of old world languages.
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