About Us
Preserving Stories. Honoring Generations.
Every family carries a story.
Some stories are passed down from one generation to the next. Others exist only in fading memories, old photographs, family conversations, and the hearts of those who remember.
At Precious Stain: A Southern Paean, we believe these stories deserve to be remembered.
This website was created to share the world behind Precious Stain: A Southern Paean by Miriam Belen—a multigenerational family story centered on the descendants of Eunice Bowen Lanier and James Corbett Lanier, whose roots trace back to southeastern Georgia
More Than a Family History
Precious Stain is more than a collection of names, dates, and family connections.
It is a journey through generations of lives, relationships, memories, struggles, and experiences.
The story follows the people behind the family tree—their joys and hardships, their choices and consequences, and the moments that shaped the generations who followed.
From the early generations of James Jackson Bowen and Queen Victoria “Pink” Burnsed Bowen to the lives of Eunice, Corbett, their children, and their descendants, each chapter adds another piece to a larger family legacy.
Our Purpose
Our purpose is simple:
To preserve the past.
To honor the people within it.
And to share the stories that continue to echo across generations.
Family history is rarely simple. It contains moments of happiness and heartbreak, connection and conflict, strength and vulnerability.
Precious Stain embraces that complexity.
The stories explore themes of family, memory, survival, trauma, resilience, relationships, loss, and love. Through these experiences, the book reflects on the ways the past can influence the present—and how each generation has the possibility of creating a different future.
Meet the Author
Miriam Belen
Miriam Belen is the author of Precious Stain: A Southern Paean, a family-centered work that preserves memories from generations of the Lanier family.
Through these stories, she brings together people, places, relationships, and experiences that might otherwise disappear with time.
Rather than presenting family history as a list of names and dates, Belen tells it through lived experience—through the personalities, conflicts, joys, tragedies, and relationships that make a family history human.
Precious Stain: A Southern Paean is an act of remembrance: a way of preserving the voices and experiences of one family while recognizing the universal emotions contained within them.
Where Memories Become Legacy
Explore the stories, relationships, and generations that shaped one Southern family—and discover the enduring power of love to transform what we inherit.