ALBANY — Robert Lewis' father owned a small trash-hauling company. essentially 50 years ago, he lower back from a run to the Cleveland municipal dump with an old Bible in a tattered brown leather-based cowl.
It caught his eye while he was dumping a load of rubbish and he rescued it from a pile of garbage. He brought it home to his son, who became a divinity school pupil in his 20s.
"right here, seem what I present in the trash. i thought you'd find it irresistible," he spoke of, understanding his son had an hobby in background.
"You've got to be kidding me. Who would throw this away?" his son asked.
So begun a protracted, unbelievable saga of a discarded Corning household Bible with hand-scrawled records of births, marriages and deaths within the 1800s from a white patrician family. It was preserved by way of a Black man descended from Mississippi slaves who saved it in a trunk together with his most prized possessions. Lewis moved the Bible and the items he valued most as a minimum a dozen instances in an itinerant career as a U.S. Navy chaplain.
the way it ended up in a Cleveland landfill remains a lasting mystery. what is certain is that the Reverend Lewis, God inclined, hopes to reunite this lost artifact with descendants of the family who cared adequate to doc generations of relations in its pages and to glue in a strip of needlepoint with the notice "Grandma."
Now 70 and living in West Pueblo, Colo., the retired chaplain found my name through a Google search that became up a narrative on the 1997 biography I posted about Erastus Corning 2nd, the 11-time period mayor of Albany who died in 1983 at age 73.
Lewis called the instances Union and reached Azra Haqqie, a news and information desk coordinator, who gave me his Colorado phone quantity.
"You're the reply to my prayers," Lewis instructed me when I referred to as him. First time I'd heard this kind of curious suggestion, but i used to be at once drawn into his story and how the wayward Corning family unit Bible came to weigh on him like some unfinished ethical mission. "I vowed i used to be no longer going to let this Bible get thrown away in the trash again," Lewis noted, his voice quavering with emotion. "I could not live with that on my judgment of right and wrong."
Lewis began his quest a couple years in the past to find a Corning descendant with whom to reunite the historic and New testament Bible, posted in Cooperstown in 1835. It became given as a marriage latest from the bride's father, William C. Carter, to Stephen and Betsey Corning at their wedding in long island metropolis in 1837. Carter inscribed the Bible with the phrases: "read, mark, be taught and inwardly digest these sacred truths."
it's doubtful how Stephen Corning is concerning Erastus Corning 2nd, whose super-grandfather, founding father of the big apple crucial Railroad, changed into regular as the original Erastus. That branch of the Corning family unit took root in the united states in 1635 when Samuel Corning, a Puritan, left his home in Devonshire, England, and sailed across the Atlantic to get away spiritual persecution. He landed in Salem, Mass., and settled on a farm in Beverly, Mass. together with his spouse, Elizabeth. He turned into elected five terms as a selectman, as a consequence setting the pace for future generations of Corning politicos.
Six generations later, Bliss Corning moved from Norwich, Conn., to a farm in Chatham, Columbia County. His son, Erastus, moved to Troy at 13 to work in his uncle's ironmongery store and leveraged enterprise acumen and entrepreneurial power to prevail as a successful service provider, financier, land speculator and railroad baron. He changed into considered one of long island's richest guys when he died in 1872.
The Bible's proprietor, Stephen B. Corning, left less of a paper path. He turned into born in Vermont circa 1814 to James Corning and Hannah Corning. He married Elizabeth "Betsey" Carter and had seven infants. in line with cemetery statistics, Corning died on June 21, 1891. he's buried in West Batavia Cemetery in Batavia, ill., in a family plot with a big granite marker alongside his spouse, Betsey, who died on Oct. 23, 1903, and one infant, Florence Corning Meeker, who died in 1897.
"The Cornings have a very big family tree and that i have not traced all branches," referred to Norman S. Rice, the 94-year-old emeritus director of the Albany Institute of heritage & art and an in depth buddy of the mayor's family unit for six decades. Rice will are trying to determine the connection. He mentioned that the Institute, established in 1791 and one of the nation's oldest museums, has a large assortment of Bibles from early Albany settlers – preserved on account of the family tree contained in them.
"A Bible is a extremely very own aspect for a family and the story of the event of this extent is interesting," mentioned Tammis Groft, government director of the institute. she will be able to ask librarian Hannah Cox, who in the past worked on the Corning Museum of Glass, to analysis Stephen Corning.
Such probabilities thrill Lewis, who hit useless ends in past few years attempting to song down descendants. She finally spoke to a Corning loved one who expressed no interest in the Bible. "i was dumbfounded," Lewis spoke of.
Lewis has four grown children and eight grandchildren and he and his spouse, Wanda, are retired. Lewis turned into a minister with the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a Navy chaplain who served within the Persian Gulf aboard the frigate united statesStark, which become hit via two Iraqi missiles in 1987, a strike that left 37 useless and 21 injured. Lewis had been granted a shore leave presently earlier than the deadly assault. "That become a lifestyles-changing incident," he pointed out.
Lewis also served as a chaplain for the Navy football team and at the Navy's base and detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lewis traced his personal household's background to the 1860 Census and a cotton plantation in Woodville, pass over. owned via John South Lewis, who owned 50 slaves.
His superb-awesome grandparents, Joseph and Hannah Lewis, labored on the plantation and had eight toddlers. one in every of their babies become named after one of the vital slave proprietor's sons. A DNA check published that Lewis is sixty four p.c Black, 24 p.c European and 12 percent Caribbean and he suspects his ancestors bore an interracial newborn or little ones with a member of the white master's household, a suspicion bolstered by means of a prognosis of osteoporosis – quite infrequent in Black men and far extra standard among whites.
If he can not find a Corning descendant who will take it, Lewis may are looking to donate it to the Albany Institute.
"The Corning family unit Bible is like an historical buddy," he spoke of. "There's a sacredness to it for me. I hope it receives exhibited to remind americans of the significance of history."
Paul Grondahl is the director of the manhattan State Writers Institute on the school at Albany and a former instances Union reporter. He will also be reached at grondahlpaul@gmail.com
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