Whitmore Surname Project: Amos & Rachael (Parsons) Wetmore Family Bible

In October 2005 Kevin Wetmore acquired the Amos and Rachael (Parsons) Wetmore Family Bible through an eBay purchase. He commented that "I received an e-mail from a friend (she has a Wetmore in law in her family) that there was a Wetmore family bible for sale on e-bay. I was fortunate enough to obtain it. However, I was kept humble by my son's comment 'congratulations Dad you won something that no one wanted and no else bid on and you paid full price.'I still think getting the bible was the right thing to do - bring it back into the clan. The seller was not able to give me any background on the bible and did not know who the owner was. It appears he goes to auction houses and combined estate sales, obtains items and then sells them on eBay. The seller obtained it in the Chicago area. "

Amos⁴ Wetmore (1740-1808) was the son of Joseph³ Wetmore,Jr, the grandson of Joseph² Wetmore, Sr and the great grandson of the immigrant ancestor, Thomas¹ Wetmore. Amos appears on pages 513 and 514 of James Carnahan Wetmore's The Wetmore Family of America.

Kevin has made transcriptions available to the major genealogical archives and is allowing us to place scans of the bible pages, in pdf format on the "net" for interested Wetmore researchers. Hal Whitmore has provided a pdf transcript.

Hal also was intrigued by the new generations of Wetmores that the bible gave us and used federal census data to bring this line into the 20th century. This line, which settled near Galesburg, Knox County, Illinois in the late 1800's, starts with Amos⁴ Wetmore and ends with Ralph⁹ Wetmore (b. ca 1909) and his sister Dorothy (b. ca. 1907). Source data for the lineage is The Wetmore Family of America, the Amos Wetmore family bible and various federal census records.

An interested Wetmore researcher has offered a 50% sponsorship for a 37 marker YDNA test for a descendant of Amos and his son Archer to bring this line into our DNA project.