Into the Past: My Road Trip to Scranton

June 10, 2026

Eight Steps Later: Following Up on the Blackman/Peck Marriage Record

Image: rawpixel.com In the never-ending quest to get my act together, I've been doing some email clean up lately. I'm finding emails I did not follow up on, including ones with photos I neglected to download, correspondence with other researchers I'd forgotten about, family stories that I didn't write down, etc. I've been assigning follow up on these emails to random days in the coming week to finally process them. Here's one example I worked on this week. Back in 2024 I was on the trail of a marriage record for the Hub's 4x great-grandparents Sylvester Blackman and Clarissa Peck. I was working from an entry in the Ancestry database "New York City, Compiled Marriage Index, 1600s-1800s " where I found an entry for the couple. 1 This Ancestry database source was the book Early Settlers of New York State, Their Ancestors and Descendants , Extracts from Vol. 4, No. 5 (Nov 1937). I found the book digitized on FamilySearch and the entry that Ancestr...

I am participating in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, a writing challenge encouraging genealogy researchers to write about their ancestors. The challenge is hosted by genealogist, blogger and podcaster Amy Johnson Crow.

Here's my post for Amy's Week Eighteen prompt: Road Trip

By Nancy Gilbride Casey

Part preparation, part dumb luck, part generosity of others, part serendipity. These things equal success on a genealogy road trip, in my recent experience. Scranton and Wayne County, Pennsylvania were my road trip destinations in March 2019—the places my Gilbride ancestors first called home in the United States.

Facebook was the perfect medium to share my discoveries while on the road in Pennsylvania, and I reported back each night to my family and friends in a series of posts I'll share here. They create a neat road trip timeline, while capturing the thrill of the find, somber closure, and other emotions which may only come by actually walking where our ancestors trod.