The Manning family Bible vanished so long ago that Leanor Manning Gilbert and Janice Manning, two Sacramento-area sisters, never knew it existed. At least, not until early December, when a stranger in Wyoming tracked them down and returned the 1870s-era Bible.

For Mary Hay of Pine Bluffs, Wyo., the Bible represents a longtime puzzle solved, a solution finally found.

For Manning, 69, and Gilbert, 68, this tattered Bible with faded inscriptions is a family artifact they've come to cherish.

"I was absolutely thrilled," says Gilbert, a retired lawyer who practiced in Canada. "I still am. Everybody who knows me has heard about it."

The package arrived on Jan Manning's south Sacramento doorstep not long before Christmas, carefully sealed in layers of bubble wrap and cardboard. But for now, the Bible is with Gilbert in her Citrus Heights town house, and she spends hours matching the scrawled lists of marriages, births and deaths with the memories she and her sister share.

As she says, "There are people in it whom we knew when they were old and we were young, people we knew only by name, and people we never knew."

Story starts at estate sale

The story begins in 2000, when Mary Hay's late stepmother bought the Bible at a Wyoming estate auction, thinking it might contain information on Hay's mother's family, whose surname was Mannings.

Nope. No connection.

"My stepmother didn't think it was right that someone was selling a family's Bible," says Hay, 43, who lives on a small horse ranch. "She was quite upset about that."

So her stepmother turned the Bible over to Hay, who enjoys researching genealogy. The idea all along was to return the Bible to its original family.

But because Hay doesn't own a home computer, she dabbled as best she could through the years, mainly using the computers at the public libraries in Cheyenne and Pine Bluffs.

A few months ago, she says, she ran across an ancestry.com link to the 2004 obituary notice of a Sacramento woman named Barbara Manning. Her husband, who died before her, had been named Willard, matching one of the final birth names listed in the Bible. Gilbert and Manning were named among the survivors.

"I typed in the daughters' names online, and lo and behold, an address comes up for Jan on the same street where Willard had been listed," says Hay.

So she called Jan Manning. Twice.

"I kept meaning to call her back," says Manning, a retired social worker. "And she made the effort to call a second time. I was just floored by the whole thing."

May have been left in move

The Manning sisters were born in Nebraska and grew up in Colorado. Their father worked as an accountant in Denver, and he owned a small apartment building where the family lived. In the 1950s, the family moved to Oregon – and in 1975, to Sacramento.

As best the sisters can figure, the Bible was among the possessions their parents left behind at the Colorado apartment, intending to send for it later.

"Either they couldn't get back to pick the things up or they forgot about them, God forbid," says Gilbert.

The Bible, several inches thick and in need of rebinding, was published in 1872 by William W. Harding of Philadelphia. But on the pages of the family section, tucked between the Old and New Testaments, someone long ago inked in Manning family dates going back to 1826.

"I'm figuring that was Amanda Manning, who went back and put in her birth date and her husband's," says Gilbert. "We don't know much about her."

Amanda Manning and her husband, Jacob Morey, lead the lists of names. On these yellowing pages, the family branches out into rosters written in different hands. Willard Emerson Manning is the last birth, listed in the early 1900s.

Unto others, a good deed

Gilbert wants to add current information about her siblings and their children and grandchildren on a separate sheet to be kept with the Bible.

As she points out, in another generation no one will remember how difficult genealogy research was before computers brought incredible amounts of information to us instantly.

But let's hope no one forgets the kind of decency that Mary Hay brought to the enterprise. She refused the Manning sisters' offers to pay her, even for shipping costs.

Says Hay: "That family was out there somewhere and I found them. It was their Bible, and now they have it.

"When I talked to her, Jan asked me how much I wanted for it. But why should she buy something that's hers anyway? I wanted her to have it."

Call The Bee's Anita Creamer, (916) 321-1136.