What should I do with the record I created?

Question

A while ago I became aware that a 230-year-old Bible that has a record of my wife's ancestors was in the possession of a descendant. I got in touch with them and was given photographs of all the pages that contained genealogical information as well as numerous newspaper clippings that were stuffed into the pages (and some pasted to the pages.)

I have created a pdf that is a description of and verbatim transcript of what's in that Bible. It contains all the handwritten information about births, marriages, and deaths as well as a description of the newspaper clippings with links to those that I could find on newspapers.com.

I've sent the draft to the owner of the Bible and received some corrections (of name spellings) as well as a request to not mention the name of the owner of the Bible. Those updates have been incorporated.

Now I'm trying to decide what to do with this pdf. I'm also considering embedding the photos in the pdf, which would make it much larger.

Generally, Bible information is posted to places like GenWeb, but this is so unique and in a non-text format. I'm not sure what to do with it. I could upload it to Wikitree, but it seems like this deserves a wider audience.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Addendum: Based upon Lucy's advice, I have created a free space profile for the Bible that you can view here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:The_Joel_Brown_Family_Bible

I am now in the process of uploading the images that are not already on Wikitree.

I hope people appreciate what a wonderful resource this is, not to mention a work of art. It should be in a museum.

Comments

Great job, Paul!

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Thank you, Mark.

Answer 1

I would make a beautiful free space. If it were me, I would use my snipping tool and transform the PDF to images and post them on a free space. Then you could use the free space as cousin-bait. Posting something on WikiTree does not limit it's audience at all. Also key in keeping your page more visible it to make small updates to it often. This way it appears to be an active page and scores higher in search engines.

Comments

I could just post all 28 images of the Bible in a free space, I suppose. But that would not include any description of the newspaper clippings or their genealogical significance.

I'm currently toying with the idea of creating a separate, companion pdf with all 28 images embedded.

Thanks for the great suggestion, Lucy.

This Bible is really a work of art. People need to see it.

Addendum: As it turns out, this was a great idea. I was able to paste the text from the document into the page and then add all 28 of the images. So now people can read the text and compare it to the images.

Thank you for the great idea, Lucy. Now people can read the text and compare it to the images.