Do you like to celebrate your birthday, or do you like to ignore that birthdays even happen at all? At the Paul Revere House, we were limited to mentioning Paul’s birthday taking place sometime in December of 1734. We know a lot about Revere and his life, but his specific birth date always alluded us.
That’s until the summer of 2019 when we acquired an exciting new collections item – a Revere family bible! More specifically, a Baskerville Bible printed in Birmingham, England, between 1769-72. This heirloom has been passed down in the Revere family, from Paul to his daughter Harriet, and eventually to the museum. In the bible, Paul records his birth date as December 21, 1734. The bible also includes other family members and their dates of birth, marriage, and death.
When you’re busy in the classroom, it can be easy to fall back on information or facts that are long established, but it’s important to remember that history can change as new facts come to light. For historians, revelations as simple as someone’s birthday are very exciting because they help to build out a more robust picture of the past.
As a museum, our work doesn’t stop when we add an object to the collection. We also have a responsibility to preserve, protect, and disseminate the knowledge gleaned from our collections. Once we became official owners of the Revere bible, we sent it away to be conserved by experts. When it returns to our care, we will incorporate it into our interpretation of Revere, his life, and his home in Boston’s North End.
We’re happy to share! The Revere House and all the Place Based Boston sites have wonderful documents and objects that may not always be on view to the public. If you have a question you think we might know the answer to, reach out and ask! It may be another case of “we don’t know” or it may give a museum educator the chance to share new and exciting information to you and your students!
The page where Paul Revere wrote his own birthday, as well as family members’ birth and death dates.
First page of biblical text, where we can find notation that Paul Revere gifted this bible to his daughter Harriet.
