New Jersey State Archives

Early map of New Jersey and New York (c. 1639)

New Jersey State Archives are the state archives of New Jersey in the United States. The archives are headquartered in Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey, and comprise a vast array of records extending all the way back to 1664 when the region was acquired by England as a colony from the Dutch during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. As such, the archives contain records for over three and a half centuries of New Jersey history and are of enormous utility for individual’s wishing to trace their ancestors who might have settled or lived in the state. Extensive original records are available to consult on site at Trenton, along with over 32,000 microfilm-reels of records. Others are available online and New Jersey is also engaged in extensive digitization of historical records though private partnership. For instance, legal records relating to the port authorities of New York and New Jersey are being digitized in collaboration with Thomas Edison University to make available records relating to the settlement and migratory history of the state.

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History of New JerseyHistory of New Jersey

New Jersey has an unusual history amongst the East Coast states in that there is not much backstory to how it was settled as a colony. There was no Mayflower arrived here or Jamestown settled by the English. Instead the New Jersey region became a focus of interest for the Swedish and Dutch in the 1630s as they attempted to join the English and French as colonizers of the seaboard of North America. Eventually the area was incorporated into the Dutch colony of New Holland, which in turn was ceded to England as a result of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in the mid-1660s. Just as New Amsterdam was renamed New York by the English, the New Jersey area was given its modern name, named for the island of the Jersey in the Channel Islands off the coast of northern France.

Nassau Hall at Princeton University

Caught between Philadelphia to the south and west and New York to the north and east, New Jersey was for a time a sort of no-man’s land of limited settlement, but eventually in the first half of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of settlers and migrants arrived here. Trenton was established as the main town in the middle of the overland route between New York and Philadelphia and Princeton University was founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746. The state’s ascent as a major center of settlement and migration on the East Coast belongs to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1800 the population was just over 210,000. By mid-century it had reached nearly half a million, while it grew to 1.4 million in 1890, 1.9 million in 1900, 2.5 million in 1910 and then to 3.1 million in 1920. The settlement of new sites such as Atlantic City from the mid-nineteenth century drove much of this, though in truth New Jersey’s ascent as a center of migration and settlement was as much a spillover from Philadelphia and in particular from New York as anything else.

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Extent of collections at New Jersey State ArchivesExtent of collections at New Jersey State Archives

An example of New Jersey baptismal records from 1902

There are a vast array of records which are useful for family history and genealogical studies at New Jersey State Archives. Marriage bond records date back to 1711 and provide a window onto settlement in colonial New Jersey. Land records are even more informative with some document series going back to the very beginning of English rule in New Jersey and an increasingly detailed set of land proprietorial records for the period from 1685 onwards. The wills and inventories records also go back as far as 1670. As with anywhere else in the western world, the level of detail and volume of records increases exponentially from the late eighteenth century onwards and there are voluminous demographic and social records extant at New Jersey State Archives for the period from the 1780s onwards (i.e. the start of independence). These include baptismal, marriage and death records, county records, tax certificates, deeds, mortgages and court records. Finally, military records, particularly for the 1860s during the American Civil War, cast extensive light on settlement in New Jersey at a time when migration was expanding dramatically amongst groups such as the Irish and Italians.

Finding material at New Jersey State ArchivesFinding material at New Jersey State Archives

Some of these records have been digitized and are accessible online. Others are copies of federal records which have been made available through New Jersey State Archives’ website and physical repositories at Trenton and elsewhere in the state. Tackling an enormous collection of tens of millions of records can seem daunting at first, but modern search aids and finding guides make the task much more feasible. All modern archives also have detailed catalogue searches. In New Jersey’s case it allows researchers to search according to record type (e.g. births, baptisms, marriages, deaths, census records are of use for family history historians) and then to include additional details such as keywords, a date range and county locations with New Jersey which will narrow your search.

Many records at New Jersey have to be consulted physically by visiting the State Archives, but many others can be accessed remotely online. Priority is generally being given by archives such as this to digitizing records which are popularly used by people working on family history projects and their genealogy. Thus, for example, New Jersey State Archives are presently engaged in digitizing their death records for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, documents which are highly useful for tracing ancestors to the state in the late 1870s, 1880s and 1890. Death records and other demographic records for the period from 1848 to 1878 and from 1901 to 2017 are already searchable online.

See alsoSee also

• English Colonization of North America
• United States Census: State and Territorial Census Records
• Newspaper Records

Explore more about New Jersey State ArchivesExplore more about New Jersey State Archives

• New Jersey Births, 1901-1929 record collection on MyHeritage
• New Jersey Marriage Licenses, 1915-2017 record collection on MyHeritage
• New Jersey Death Index, 1920-1929, 1949-2017 record collection on MyHeritage
• Next Exit: Your New Jersey Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Following a Quaker Family: New Jersey to Iowa the Long Way Around at Legacy Family Tree Webinars

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