There’s an old saying that a worn-out Bible belongs to a soul that isn’t. On my desk there is an old and very worn, written in, thumbed through, well studied Bible. It’s a King James version with the words of Christ in red letters. If any of you are older than 40 and from the south, you know exactly what I am talking about here. Your grandmother had this Bible. This bible though belonged to my Great-Grandfather Aderhold.

I don’t remember him, but I have been told stories about him all my life. We have pictures of him and my Great-Grandmother Aderhold hanging in our home. They were a very hard-working family from what is now the west side of Atlanta between there and Douglasville. I remember vaguely my great-grandmother. I was only 3 or 4 when she passed away. In the hallway of my home, I have a painting of her as a young girl. My cousins and I talk about our memories of them often when we get together. My cousin Keith (who passed away of cancer a few years ago) would always say Granddaddy Aderhold was the reason we were all salesmen. You see, he sold Raleigh Products. If you aren’t from an old southern family, you might not know this was our version of Watkins Products. It wasn’t a pyramid scheme like the other companies you may recall. Rather, you had routes and sold everything from medicine to clothes to home goods. Great-Granddaddy Aderhold had a route in Atlanta. Mainly in the area from Georgia Tech to what used to be Sylvan Hills and to the west. Back then that was dirt roads folks… Imagine that.

He would trade his goods sometimes for pies, chickens, goats, eggs, etc. If you didn’t have the money to pay but had something he thought he could use, he would trade with you. My Dad tells stories about riding with him and being told to walk up to homes to collect the bill and coming back with all this and more. He even had a small farm in the outskirts of downtown. He raised rabbits, goats (my dad says he didn’t drink cow’s milk till he went to school), chickens, pigs, and even a raccoon my grandmother adopted when she was a child. Oh, and one of the pigs was named Skates. My grandmother said it broke her heart when Skates showed up as sausage.

Great Granddaddy Aderhold was a character by all accounts. A devout Christian man, a family man, and a fair businessman who helped a lot of people in his time. But back to the Bible. Somewhere in those worn and faded pages is my name. I’ve found it in the past but neglected to mark it every time. He was reading when he got the call about me being born in August1976. He wrote my name down so as to not forget. Now I ask you, how much would that mean to you? To know you were prayed for, cared for, and three generations were excited about you being here? The man I never really knew impacted my life far more than he realized.

That Bible will always be with me. The family stories and history will live on as long as I share it with my children and one day my grandchildren. That’s how this world is supposed to work. So please keep those items that tell a story, keep those items that invoke the strong tug of memory, keep those items that mean your family has endured. One day it will be a story spanning centuries.

Tight lines and following seas y’all!

—Outdoors columnist James Pressley can be reached at jameskpressley@gmail.com .