Blog Recap: Researching Your Pre-May 1848 NJ Ancestors

Thank you all for attending yesterday’s 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)

Primary Documents (Records) vs. Secondary Resources (Books)

• Most of the Primary Documents we discussed can be ordered from the New Jersey State Archives. 
• Order County Collections from either the County Clerk’s Office (deeds, mortgages, marriage records, etc.) or the County Surrogate’s Office (estate papers).
  • See the County Page of the Genealogy Research Guide for a listing of searchable indexes to records available from the county offices’ websites.
  • FamilySearch.org has several NJ County records collections in the browsable image collections (except County Marriages, which are indexed!).  You will need to sign in with your free FamilySearch.org account to access.
• The State Library has a wealth of secondary resources available, including 6000 Family Histories.  Use the State Library Catalog to create a booklist!

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
• 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-great for researching historic locations/boundaries of municipalities.
• Digitized Journal and Minutes of the Legislature plus Laws of New Jersey, dating from colonial to modern era.  The 1714 law making it difficult for enslavers to manumit African descended people is here (see section 14).