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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...
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Tell Me a Story: Using Heirlooms and Artifacts to Inspire Your Writing

At a recent meeting of local genealogists, we discussed the article entitled, "Story Triggers: Finding Inspiration for Writing Family History"—about how our senses can help us tell family stories. The article's author, Sandra J. Crowley, noted that these triggers can fall into several categories aligned with the senses, such as visual, auditory, environmental, etc.1 

As I considered what I tend to gravitate to, I find that artifacts and heirlooms are what inspires me the most: a photo, a piece of crocheting, a baby book, an embroidery, etc. A single artifact can appeal to several senses at once: to the visual, the tactile, and even the olfactory. Think about a fragile marriage certificate that nearly crumbles to the touch, yet is still colorful, and carries a faint smell of old paper. 

I've found heirlooms and artifacts are rich inspiration for my writing, and penned an article, "Tell Me a Story: Using Heirlooms and Artifacts to Inspire Your Writing," for the Texas State Genealogical Society's journal, Stirpes, last year. I included many examples of how I used these items to write about the item's place in our family history, its owner's past, or as a starting point to tell a family story. You can read the article below.

I hope you're inspired to think about the artifacts you own and how they can help you tell the story of your own family. What will you write about? Tell me in the comments.

Until next time...

© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2026. All rights reserved. 


P.S. Our discussion group is called Connections. Sponsored by the Denton Public Library, it is modeled after the National Genealogical Society Quarterly's study groups, and uses articles from Stirpes, the Journal of the Texas State Genealogical Society, as the basis for discussion. TxSGS subsequently picked up the model and offers it to their Partner Societies as the Stirpes Study Group. For more info on this program, visit: https://www.txsgs.org/stirpes-study-group/


NOTES

1  Sandra J. Crowley, "Story Triggers: Finding Inspiration for Writing Family History," Stirpes: Journal of the Texas State Genealogical Society, 64:1 (March 2025), 46-48.

 


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  1. AnonymousMay 7, 2026 at 12:53 PM

    Sandra Robertson --the Stirpes article gives many examples of family heirlooms as a means of starting the writing process. I have used some of my treasured heirlooms to write about the person who owned the item as it shows an aspect of their life.

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    1. Nancy Gilbride CaseyMay 17, 2026 at 9:23 AM

      Sandra, you are doing a great job using heirlooms and I'm sure that your family is finding the stories very interesting and enlightening. They will never look at those items the same way again! Thanks for reading.

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