Missing Bible returned 50 y. later incl. keepsakes
Published: March 2, 2006
A Bible missing for more than half a century recently was returned to its original owner with keepsakes still tucked inside.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Marjorie Hereford, 82. “I just couldn’t believe it. I sure am glad to get it back.”
Hereford was just a teenager when her parents presented her with the Bible as a Christmas gift. As the years rolled by, she tucked important papers inside the book. The mementos included her marriage certificate and newspaper clippings regarding the births of her children.
She lost the Bible through a simple mistake and regained it through a series of fortunate coincidences.
Hereford, who now resides at SunBridge in Hurricane, said she and her husband were in the process of moving from Cora Street to Hansford Street in Charleston when the Bible was inadvertently thrown away with some other things. That was in 1950.
Last November, oldest daughter Mary Ellen Murphy came to visit from her home in San Antonio. Murphy asked her mother if she would like to go to a service at First Advent Christian Church on Randolph Street.
The church had special meaning for the family because Hereford’s father, Amos Houston Lowe, was a deacon and elder in the church. Murphy had been baptized there as a little girl. Hereford hadn’t been there since the 1960s.
“Mother wanted to go see the church,” Murphy said. “My husband and I picked her up at the nursing home in Hurricane. She really enjoyed it. The pianist, Helen Estep, recognized mother. She is 93 and still plays the piano.”
After the service, church member Juanita Duff took Murphy and her mother on a tour.
“I asked Juanita to send me a church bulletin once or twice a year,” Murphy said. “I gave her my name, address and telephone number so I could get a few bulletins now and then.”
Murphy and her husband went to Hawaii to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in the first couple of weeks in January. They returned to find a stack of mail and a package from Duff that contained the long-lost Bible.
A woman who had been attending a monthly Bible study at the church noticed a glass window with the name of Amos Lowe. She recalled an old Bible she had bought about 10 years earlier had that name in it.
The woman, Beulah Cantley of Coopers Creek, said she bought the Bible at either a flea market or yard sale and can’t remember what she paid for it. She loves genealogy and feared if she didn’t buy it that someone would throw it away.
When she saw the glass window of the church with Lowe’s name on it, she took the Bible to Duff and asked if she could track the family.
“It was a miracle,” Murphy said. “I had just left that church with my name and address. It was a miracle she gave the Bible to Juanita Duff and that Juanita mailed it to me. That was God’s hand in that. The last time I had been to that church, I was 20 something. Now I’m 62 and a half.”
Murphy immediately called her mother.
“She could not believe it,” Murphy said. “She was so excited. I said, ‘I don’t know if your daddy is trying to reach you one last time.’ ”
Murphy added, “God saw to it she got her Bible back.”
She also regained several papers that were important to her.
A marriage certificate says that on Aug. 24, 1942 Marjorie Leona Lowe and Charles Robert Hereford were united in holy matrimony in Charleston by Pastor J. Fremont Whitman of First Advent Christian Church on Randolph Street.
A newspaper clipping notes the couple married on a Monday evening at the home of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Amos Lowe of West Washington Street.
Charles Robert Hereford, who made a living driving a tanker for Exxon, died in 1990. Their children include Carl Edward Hereford of St. Albans; Robert Amos Hereford of Charleston; Charlotte Blackburn of Thomasville, N.C.; and Mary Ellen Murphy of San Antonio, Texas. Another son, Eugene Charles Hereford, died Dec. 7, 2005, of cancer.
Hereford gingerly unfolds precious papers that were in the Bible when it was tossed out and remained there. As far as she can recall, everything she put inside the Bible is still there — even four-leaf clovers she once collected.
Staff at SunBridge offered to lock away the Bible for safekeeping, but Hereford declined. She likes to hold it, look at the treasures inside and read scriptures, including her favorite — Psalm 100.
That’s a psalm of thanksgiving that ends: “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”
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