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

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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 Ancestry was referring to, shown below.²

 

 

I also paged back in the book to see where the information came from: "Marriage Records, copied from Buffalo Newspapers, are published through the courtesy of the Buffalo Historical Society."³ But which newspaper?

I posed this question to the genealogy specialists at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, who found the event in a 1901 book of Buffalo marriage and deaths transcribed from newspapers. It noted the announcement appeared in the Buffalo Gazette. However, the library did not have that newspaper in their collection.⁴ 

I went searching on Newspapers.com for the Buffalo Gazette and turned up something interesting. The newspaper at the time of the marriage notice was known as the Buffalo Patriot and Commercial Advertiser, not the Buffalo Gazette. When the 1901 book was being compiled, they noted "Gaz." for Gazette next to the entry for the marriage announcement, as that was the name at the time.⁵

And here is the announcement, published on 16 May 1815:⁶

As is typical, this source led to more questions, such as "Where was the town of Cayuga Creek?"  I could not find that locale on the historical maps. Here again, the experts at the Buffalo library were super helpful, pointing me to the 1884 book History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County: with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers. I found that the southern part of Lancaster, Erie County, New York, was known as "Cayuga Creek," so named for the creek which flowed through it.⁷

Interestingly, the book revealed a possible Blackman connection: 

"In 1810 the first school house in the township was built. It was of logs and was located on the farm lately owned by Leonard Blackman." Could Sylvester have been kin to Leonard? Is that why the marriage took place in Cayuga Creek?^?8

I also discovered another issue with this newspaper notice: No marriage date is noted! So, where did the Early Settlers book get the May 16, 1895 date? While the book gives no explanation for what dates mean, it is the announcement publication date. How many people have assumed it was the marriage date? 

Yet another issue with this announcement is that we don't know who the informant was, so we can't judge the quality of the information and evidence. Was the informant D. Rawson? Sylvester? A newspaper staffer copying a record book? Who knows. Could they have gotten the information wrong? Without seeing the original source, we don't know.

Have I found the proof of Sylvester and Clarissa's marriage? I'm closer, but not quite yet. 

The takeaway here is that an index entry is just a starting point. It can take many more steps to finally get to the record you ultimately need and the context with which to understand it. 

I'm eight steps into my search for this record...

1. Ancestry database 
2. Early Settlers book 
3. Buffalo Library inquiry 
4. Marriage Index book
5. Newspapers.com for Buffalo Gazette/Buffalo Patriot and Commercial Advertiser
6. Marriage announcement
7. Back to library about Cayuga Creek
8. History of the City of Buffalo book

...and I still need the original source of the marriage record and the exact marriage date. But I do know a lot more about the event than I did when I started, and that's progress.

Until next time... 

 © Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2026. All rights reserved.

NOTES

¹ "New York City, Compiled Marriage Index, 1600s-1800s," database without images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7854/records/93205 : accessed 9 June 2026), search term "Sylvester Blackmon," entry for Blackmon/Peck marriage; citing Early Settlers of New York State, Their Ancestors and Descendants, Extracts from Vol. 4, No. 5 (Nov. 1937).

² Jane Wethy Foley, Early Settlers of New York State, Their Ancestors and Descendants, Vol. 4, "Marriage Records," p. 78, marriage of Sylvester Blackmon and Clarissa Peck, 16 May 1815; imaged, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/454282/ : accessed 14 Dec. 2024). Marriages were copied from Buffalo newspapers, published courtesy of Buffalo Historical Society. 

³ Ibid, 77.

⁴ Rhonda Hoffman, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library [e-address for private use,] to Nancy Casey, e-mail, 4 April 2024, "Early Buffalo newspaper marriage announcement"; "Blackman Research" Gmail label; privately held by Casey [e-address & address for private use,] Tioga, TX, 2026.

⁵ William Ives, "The Why of this Book," Buffalo & Erie County Public Library Digital Collections (https://digital.buffalolib.org/document/2038 : accessed 9 June 2026). Manuscript contains handwritten transcriptions of marriage and death announcements printed in Buffalo newspapers.

⁶ "Married," Buffalo Patriot and Commercial Advertiser, 16 May 1815 p. 3, col. 3, Sylvester Blackmor and Clarissa Peck; imaged, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/255004188/ : accessed 8 June 2026).

⁷ H.P. Smith, History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County: with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, Vol. 2, (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason & Co., 1884), 453; imaged, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/historycitybuff00smitgoog/page/n516/mode/2up : accessed 7 June 2026); citing University of Virginia.

⁸ Ibid.