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Kaye McFadden found pieces of history in a Bible in a dresser she bought at a yard sale more than 20 years ago.
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For the past 26 years, a mysterious piece of history has tugged at Kay McFadden's curiosity.
The 40-pound, 172-year-old edition of "The Devotional Family Bible" entered the McFadden house in the Todds Tavern area of Spotsylvania County by chance.
Kay and her husband, Larry, found it in the bottom of a chest of drawers they bought at a yard sale on the road back from Lynchburg.
They'd stopped there in the summer of 1981, somewhere along U.S. 29 in Nelson County.
When Larry pulled one of the drawers out, he saw the Bible, which lay in two pieces.
Kay alerted the seller, but "He said, 'I don't sell Bibles and I don't buy Bibles, you take that with the furniture,'" Larry said.
And so began a journey that would lead Kay through history, from the inauguration of America's first president to the world's first trans-Atlantic flight and beyond.
It was an exciting discovery for McFadden, who loves the thrill of a treasure hunt, can't resist a yard sale and brims with excitement when she talks about movies like "National Treasure" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Inscribed in calligraphy on the first pages of the Bible are names of the members of the Rollinson family, which had a storied history in New York and New Jersey around the turn of the 20th century.
A tattered clipping from the New York Herald Tribune that was in the Bible tells of the death on Oct. 15, 1937, of Charles Rollinson. He was an engraver who had designed the $25,000 check that was awarded to Charles Lindbergh when he completed the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927.
After visiting the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, Kay learned that Charles Rollinson was likely a descendant of William Rollinson, who designed the buttons that George Washington wore on his inauguration uniform.
With an illustrious cast of characters laid out in the Bible's pages, McFadden set out to chip away at their history.
One day, she tried to track down one of the family members. Reginald Rollinson's birth on Oct. 7, 1907, is recorded in the Bible, but his death is not. It was the early 1980s, and McFadden figured he might still be alive.
On a long shot, she called information and asked for a Reginald Rollinson in New York.
"What city?" the operator asked.
McFadden, unfamiliar with New York, blurted out the first thing that came to her mind.
"Manhattan."
After a few minutes, she was dialing a number.
An older woman answered.
"May I speak to Reginald?" McFadden remembers asking.
"What kind of sick joke is this?" the woman on the other end said.
"I said, 'Is this Lucie Mackey?'" McFadden said.
It was. Lucie Mackey was Reginald's wife's maiden name, and McFadden knew that because the couple's wedding announcement was among the clippings in the Bible.
"I said, 'I've got your Bible.'"
"Did you find it in an old chifforobe?" Mackey said, using an old word for the combination dresser and armoire in which the Bible had been found.
She went on to tell McFadden that Reginald had died in 1948. That would fill in a blank in the Bible's birth and death lists.
McFadden said it crossed her mind to mark the date down herself, but she thought better of it and decided not to leave a mark on the book.
Mackey also said that the piece of furniture that the Bible was in had been stolen from her family's home "during the war," McFadden said. She can only assume that meant World War II.
Mackey and McFadden continued their conversation, but Mackey never expressed any interest, McFadden said, in getting the Bible back.
Over the years that followed, McFadden has filled her AOL favorites page with links to articles about the people named in the Bible.
"It just sort of grabs you and you want to know more," she said.
While the search has been fascinating, McFadden admits it seems strange that a whole family's history should come to rest in her home.
It's not uncommon, though.
Minor Weisiger, archives research services coordinator for the Library of Virginia, said family Bibles regularly turn up at thrift shops, yard sales and consignment stores.
Weisiger's own grandfather had an 18th-century Bible that was in poor condition but included a couple of pages of birth and death records from an unknown family.
Weisiger ended up throwing the Bible away, "but before I did so, I retrieved the family history from the middle," he said.
He hasn't been able to find a family that it might belong to, though he still tries through the occasional Web search.
As a librarian, Weisiger knows how valuable family Bible records can be. The Library of Virginia has more than 5,000 scanned pages of Bible records on its Web site.
Since Virginia birth records go back only to 1853, these can be a vital tool in genealogy research.
McFadden hadn't ever thought much about what to do with the Bible.
Recently, though, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the few months since getting that news, she has set out to find a new home for the book.
Ideally, she said, she would like to sell it, and holds out hope that it could provide some help toward paying burial expenses that she fears her family won't be able to bear.
But McFadden said she knows that the artifact that has been sitting in her living room all these years could serve a better purpose somewhere else.
"I know in my heart that this ought to be somewhere where it's preserved and protected," McFadden said. "It doesn't make sense that I would have it."
Emily Battle: 540/374-5413
