What's the number-one best-selling, most widely read book of all time? No, it's not one by Stephen King, John Grisham or Danielle Steele. It's the Bible. Since at least 1611 — the first popular English-edition printing of the King James Version — the Bible has been purchased and read by millions of people. For many of your ancestors, this was the only book they possessed. Family members learned how to read from it; some learned how to write, copying down passages for practice. Before radio and TV, for entertainment in the evenings the head of the household or someone needing to practice reading skills would read Bible stories out loud to the rest of the family. No wonder this central book in peoples' lives would be the same volume in which they would record their family's life events: births, marriages and deaths.

Your early American ancestors either brought their family Bibles with them from their homeland or purchased them from importers. The first Bible printed in the United States was in 1782, and not long after, in 1791, the first “Family Bible” was printed and sold. In the days before Amazon.com, Bible salesmen went door to door selling family Bibles, making them popular among middle-class Americans.