Blog Recap: Researching Your Pre-May 1848 NJ Ancestors

Thank you all for attending our webinar on Researching Your Pre-May 1848 New Jersey Relatives.  I hope you found the information useful!  Don’t forget that the slide deck for the class and a flow chart for Pre-May 1848 research strategies are up on the Genealogy Research Guide’s Guides and Handouts page.

In the webinar, we discussed:

The importance of the May 1848 milestone:

• State of New Jersey began to collect Birth, Marriage, and Death data for all residents.
• Records also provide personal information (including birthdate, age, parents’ names)

Where to start

• If they married or died after May 1848, New Jersey State Vital Records.
• If not, Secretary of State’s Estate Papers, indexed in Index to New Jersey Wills.)

Pre May 1848 Resources

• Early Land Records

• County Marriages
• FamilySearch.org Image Collections
  • Browsable New Jersey County Clerk and Surrogate Offices records, including Deeds and Estate Papers
• Colonial Marriage Bonds
• Family Histories
  • Many produced pre-copyright law
  • Use a subject keyword search “[surname] family” in the State Library’s catalog to get a list of relevant items.
  • Sort the list by publication date to find potentially digitized older books
• Extracts from American Newspapers Relating to New Jersey (first secondary resource to check!)
• The Story of New Jersey’s Civil Boundaries (didn’t discuss in webinar, but wanted to add it in!)
  • Great for researching historic locations/boundaries of municipalities.
  • If you are researching in a county that didn’t exist in the 1790’s, this will help you to figure out where your municipality of interest was located back in the day. (Example: Trenton was originally in Hunterdon County, before Mercer County was founded in 1838. Before Hunterdon County was founded in 1714, the area surrounding Trenton would have been part of Burlington County!)