Handwriting Analysis

The Reese Bible has survived 148 years and traveled some 2,000 miles. The birth/marriage/death records written in several different people's handwriting are easy to read, and they record events of family members in Herkimer County, New York; Dodge County, Wisconsin, and DeKalb County, Illinois.  There are huge holes in these records.  Many events are simply not recorded.  Some marriages are listed, others are not.  Some births are carefully recorded, others are not mentioned.  Some people do not have portraits included.  There are portraits of people inserted in the pages without any hint of how they are related.  But don't worry, I have identified all but one of these relationships now.

  What this appears to add up to, is that the bible changed hands over time.  This is a clue.  Owners recorded events that were important to them, or those that they had direct knowledge of.  I've been trying to analyze the handwriting to distinguish which hands recorded which group of events, and what year did they start/stop.  I hope to match that with death years of our suspected writers, those deaths being the approximate time the bible gets handed off to a new generation.  The suspects come from analyzing what family is being recorded during a time frame and which are being ignored.  I'm using an Excel spreadsheet for this analysis.  I love Excel.
  My guess is that Adam Reese's wife Mary Ann was the first owner of the bible and started recording family events, some retroactively, because the pages start with her parents.  Then in 1902, a different handwriting records Mary Ann's death.