An old family Bible
Antony Barlow tells the story of a precious family possession
When my mother died in 2007, at the age of ninety-three, I acquired many of the family archives. These had always intrigued me as a child, studying family trees or old letters dating back some hundreds of years.
Much of our family’s earliest Quaker ancestry is gleaned from a family Bible, known as the Lancaster Bible, which dates from 1616. The Bible belonged to James Lancaster. Our recorded family story starts at the very beginning of Quakerism, around the 1660s, when George Fox was gathering his first followers around him. One of the first of these was James Lancaster, our ancestor, and the Bible, which was stained by the salt water when he dropped it as he was fleeing persecution across Morecambe sands, has been handed down through his daughter’s family ever since. It now belongs to my elder brother David.
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