New Jersey Genealogy

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New Jersey Genealogy Research Guide

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New Jersey Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

New Jersey was one of the original thirteen colonies and became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, on December 18, 1787. It grew out of Dutch and Swedish settlements on the Hudson and lower Delaware that England seized in 1664, after which the colony was split for a generation into two separately governed provinces — East Jersey and West Jersey. That proprietary division, and the state’s long habit of keeping records at the county and municipal level, make jurisdiction the first thing to pin down in any New Jersey search.

• Capital: Trenton, the seat of state government since 1790.
• Statehood: December 18, 1787, the third state, formed from the British Province of New Jersey.
• Counties: 21. The first four — Bergen, Essex, Middlesex, and Monmouth — date to 1683; the last, Union County, was created in 1857.
• Land type: New Jersey is a state-land state, not a federal (public-domain) state. Original title passed from the Proprietors of East and West Jersey rather than the federal government, so there are no federal General Land Office records for New Jersey — early grants are documented at the proprietary and state level and later transfers at the county level.
• Nickname and motto: the Garden State; the state motto is Liberty and Prosperity.
• Where records live: most genealogical records — deeds, probate, and naturalizations — are kept at the county level, while the state’s vital records, colonial wills, tax ratables, and military records are centralized at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton.

Libraries and Archives

New Jersey’s records are concentrated in Trenton, where the state archives and library hold the centralized colonial and state collections, while county clerks, surrogates, and local historical societies keep the records created in their own jurisdictions. The principal repositories include:

• New Jersey State Archives (Trenton) — the central repository for colonial and state records: vital records from 1848 to 1900, colonial and state deeds and patents, wills proved by the Prerogative Court, tax ratables, military service records and abstracts, court records, and naturalizations. Its online searchable databases index a large share of these.
• New Jersey State Library (Trenton) — published genealogies, local histories, newspapers, digitized law compilations, and digital collections.
• Genealogical Society of New Jersey (GSNJ) — the statewide society, publisher of the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey, with manuscript collections housed at Rutgers.
• New Jersey Historical Society (Newark) — manuscripts, church records, and a large biographical card index.
• Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives (New Brunswick) — the GSNJ and DAR collections and the records of the West Jersey Proprietors.
• Newark Public Library, Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center — New Jersey genealogy, newspapers, and city directories.
• National Archives at Philadelphia — federal court, naturalization, census, passenger-arrival, and military records for New Jersey.
• Holland Society of New York — Dutch Reformed and New Netherland records for the Bergen and northeastern New Jersey Dutch families.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive New Jersey microfilm and digital collections, and county clerks, county surrogates, and local historical societies hold the records for their own areas.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized New Jersey records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of New Jersey vital, land, probate, court, church, and naturalization records.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive New Jersey vital, census, probate, land, naturalization, and military collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — New Jersey birth, marriage, and death indexes and immigration collections.
• Findmypast ($) — New Jersey vital records, naturalizations, and Historical Society of Pennsylvania collections.
• New Jersey State Archives Searchable Databases — free; indexes to vital, land, court, military, and Civil War records drawn from the State Archives.
• New Jersey State Library Digital Collections — free; digitized state documents, session laws, and New Jersey history.
• DigiFind-It — free and subscription; digitized New Jersey local newspapers and municipal records.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized New Jersey histories, published record abstracts, and law books.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress historic newspaper archive.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Law and Government

New Jersey’s colonial and early state laws help explain the jurisdictions and record-keeping practices that produced its genealogical records, and the foundational texts are digitized and free to read.

• The Grants, Concessions, and Original Constitutions of the Province of New Jersey (Leaming and Spicer) — the proprietary-era charters, the Concession and Agreement of 1665, and the early acts of the East and West Jersey assemblies; free on the Internet Archive.
• Nevill’s Acts of the General Assembly of the Province of New-Jersey and Allinson’s Laws (1776) — the statutes of the royal colony to the Revolution; digitized on Google Books and the Internet Archive.
• The New Jersey State Library’s Historical Compilations of New Jersey Law indexes and links digitized laws from the early 1700s onward.
• The Avalon Project hosts New Jersey’s colonial charters and grants, 1664–1776.
• The Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey (the New Jersey Archives, First Series) reprint the colonial correspondence, council journals, and newspaper extracts and are free on the Internet Archive; they are also name-searchable in New Jersey, U.S., Published Archives Series, 1631–1782 ($) on Ancestry.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

New Jersey was among the earliest states to require statewide civil registration, which began in May 1848, though many early events went unrecorded. Town clerks had been ordered to register vital events as far back as the 1670s, but few complied, and general compliance was not reached until about 1920. For events before the mid-nineteenth century, church records are essential.

The New Jersey State Archives holds the original birth, marriage, and death returns from May 1848 through 1900 and provides mail reference and online indexes; records from 1901 onward are held by the state Office of Vital Statistics and Registry. Genealogical copies open after set intervals (births after 100 years; marriages and deaths after 80 years), with more recent records restricted to the person or a direct relative. Use these online indexes to identify a record, then order it:

• Births: New Jersey Births and Christenings, 1660–1980 is free on FamilySearch; also New Jersey, U.S., Births and Christenings Index, 1660–1931 ($) and New Jersey Births, 1901–1929 ($) on MyHeritage.
• Marriages: New Jersey Marriages, 1670–1980 and New Jersey County Marriages, 1682–1956 are free on FamilySearch; New Jersey, U.S., Marriage Records, 1670–1965 ($) and the colonial New Jersey, U.S., Marriage Records, 1683–1802 ($) are on Ancestry, with the modern Marriage Index, 1901–2016 ($); MyHeritage carries the Marriage License Index, 1901–1914 ($) and 1915–2016 ($).
• Deaths: New Jersey Deaths and Burials, 1720–1988 is free on FamilySearch; also New Jersey, U.S., Deaths and Burials Index, 1798–1971 ($) on Ancestry.
• Combined early records: New Jersey, U.S., Birth, Marriage and Death Records, 1711–1878 ($) draws on the earliest state returns and church registers, and the free New Jersey State Archives databases index the state’s deaths from May 1848 onward.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped New Jersey’s jurisdictions and records:

• 1609 — Henry Hudson explores the bay and river, opening the region to Dutch trade.
• 1638 — Swedes and Finns begin settling the lower Delaware (New Sweden), founding communities that would include Swedesboro.
• 1660 — Bergen, the first permanent European settlement, is established on the west bank of the Hudson (now part of Jersey City).
• 1664 — England seizes the region from the Dutch; Charles II grants it to his brother James, Duke of York, who conveys it to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, who name it for the Isle of Jersey.
• 1665 — The Concession and Agreement sets the terms of government, and Philip Carteret becomes the first governor.
• 1673–1674 — A brief Dutch reconquest is reversed the following year.
• 1676 — The Quintipartite Deed divides the colony into East Jersey (capital Perth Amboy) and West Jersey (capital Burlington), each run by its own board of proprietors.
• 1683 — The first four counties — Bergen, Essex, Middlesex, and Monmouth — are organized in East Jersey.
• 1702 — East and West Jersey are reunited as a single royal colony; the proprietors surrender government but keep their land rights.
• 1702–1738 — New Jersey shares a royal governor with New York until it receives its own governor.
• 1743 — The Lawrence Line fixes the final boundary between the East and West divisions.
• 1776–1783 — New Jersey is a principal theater of the Revolution, with major actions at Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth; the first state constitution is adopted in July 1776.
• December 18, 1787 — New Jersey ratifies the U.S. Constitution as the third state.
• 1790 — Trenton becomes the permanent state capital.
• 1804 — A gradual-abolition law begins the long end of slavery in New Jersey, the last northern state to do so.
• 1831–1834 — The Morris Canal and the Delaware and Raritan Canal open, driving settlement and industry across the state.
• 1844 — A new state constitution reorganizes county and court government.
• 1848 — Statewide civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths begins.
• 1857 — Union County, the last of the twenty-one counties, is created from Essex.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses were taken every ten years from 1790, but New Jersey’s early schedules were largely lost: the 1790, 1810, and 1820 enumerations are gone, and only a fragment of the 1800 census (Cumberland County) survives, so the first substantial surviving federal census for New Jersey is 1830. The 1890 census was destroyed nationally, though a few Jersey City schedules survive. Surviving federal censuses are free on FamilySearch and searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).

State censuses are unusually important in New Jersey because so many early federal schedules are missing. Taken every ten years from 1855 through 1915, they fall between the federal years, and the complete set is held at the New Jersey State Archives. What each one records varies by year:

• 1855: names only the head of each household, counting the others by category; several counties are missing or only partially enumerated. Indexed with images on FamilySearch.
• 1865: the same head-of-household format, again with gaps in county coverage. Indexed with images on FamilySearch.
• 1875: survives for only a few counties and is not available online through FamilySearch; the surviving schedules are held by the State Archives and county repositories.
• 1885: the first state census to survive for the whole state, naming every person; a valuable substitute for the destroyed 1890 federal census. Indexed on FamilySearch.
• 1895: names every person and covers all counties; searchable with images on Ancestry ($).
• 1905: resembles the 1900 federal census, adding each person’s relationship to the head of household; indexed on FamilySearch.
• 1915: the last New Jersey state census, covering every county; indexed with images on FamilySearch.

Substitutes. Where censuses are missing, the colonial and Revolutionary tax ratables are the best substitutes, and two published “censuses” reconstruct the Revolutionary generation: Kenn Stryker-Rodda’s Revolutionary Census of New Jersey, drawn from the 1770s and 1780s ratables, and James S. Norton’s New Jersey in 1793, built from militia and tax lists. City directories and the 1693 Census of Swedes on the Delaware fill further gaps.

Church Records

Because civil registration is late, church records are the most important substitute for vital records before about 1848, and the denomination often follows the region a family settled. The earliest congregations were Dutch Reformed in the northeast, Swedish Lutheran on the lower Delaware, and Quaker in West Jersey, joined later by Presbyterian, Anglican and Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, and Roman Catholic churches.

• New Jersey, Church Records, 1675–1970 — free; baptisms, marriages, and burials from congregations across the state, and the most efficient single online starting point.
• Dutch Reformed records for Bergen, Hudson, Passaic, and Somerset families appear in the published Holland Society Year Books and in the U.S. Dutch Reformed church-record collections on Ancestry ($).
• Quaker (Society of Friends) records for the West Jersey meetings of Burlington, Salem, and Gloucester are abstracted in Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy (the New Jersey and Pennsylvania volume).
• Methodist records are held by the Greater New Jersey United Methodist archives at Drew University and Episcopal records by the Diocese of New Jersey; thousands of congregational registers can be found through the FamilySearch Catalog by county and town.

Catholic parish records are held by the parish or diocesan archives — for example the Archdiocese of Newark and the dioceses of Trenton and Camden — and the earliest Catholic baptisms were performed by missionaries traveling from Philadelphia.

Court Records

New Jersey’s courts changed repeatedly before the modern system took shape in 1948, and their records reach well beyond lawsuits into estates, guardianships, naturalizations, and name changes. The main courts a researcher encounters are:

• Surrogate’s Court, in each county — proves wills, grants administrations, and appoints guardians for minors.
• Court of Common Pleas, the county civil court — recorded marriages (from 1795), naturalizations, name changes, and manumissions of enslaved people.
• Supreme Court, from the colonial period — the statewide common-law court, which also naturalized many immigrants; its records are at the State Archives.
• Court of Chancery — the equity court, which handled property disputes, foreclosures, divorces, and some naturalizations; records into the 1940s are at the State Archives.
• Colonial courts — the Court of Common Right in East Jersey and the county courts of West Jersey, whose survivals include the published Burlington Court Book, 1680–1709.

Colonial and early state court records are described among the New Jersey State Archives holdings, and modern case information is available through the New Jersey Courts.

Ethnic/Minority Records

New Jersey has been ethnically mixed since its founding, and knowing where a group settled points to the records most likely to document a family.

• Dutch. The founders of Bergen and the northeastern towns, documented in Dutch Reformed church records, the Holland Society of New York, and the New Netherland records at the New Jersey State Archives.
• Swedes and Finns. The settlers of New Sweden on the lower Delaware (Gloucester and Salem); the 1693 Census of Swedes on the Delaware and the Trinity “Old Swedes” Lutheran registers identify many of these families.
• Quakers. The dominant early settlers of West Jersey (Burlington, Salem, Gloucester), whose monthly-meeting minutes are unusually complete and detailed.
• Germans. Palatines and other Germans who settled the northwestern counties, described in Theodore Chambers’s The Early Germans of New Jersey, free on the Internet Archive.
• Irish and Italians. The great nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration into Newark, Jersey City, and the industrial northeast, documented in Catholic parish, cemetery, and naturalization records.
• African Americans. People of African descent have lived in New Jersey since the Dutch period, first largely enslaved. New Jersey was the last northern state to abolish slavery, beginning with the gradual-abolition act of 1804, and it had more all-Black Underground Railroad communities than any other northern state — among them Timbuctoo in Burlington County, Springtown in Cumberland, and Lawnside in Camden. Slave-birth and manumission records are at the New Jersey State Archives, and free-Black land transactions appear in county deed books.
• Lenape (Delaware). The indigenous people of New Jersey; colonial purchases of their land are documented in the early proprietary and secretary-of-state records at the State Archives.

Immigration and Naturalization

Most immigrants to New Jersey arrived through the neighboring ports of New York and Philadelphia rather than at New Jersey’s own harbors, so passenger research usually begins with those ports’ arrival records.

• New York Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists, including Castle Garden and Ellis Island, 1820–1957 ($); the same manifests are also free on FamilySearch, with free indexes through the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation database.
• Philadelphia passenger lists (1800–1945), the records of the secondary port for New Jersey arrivals, are free on FamilySearch and on Ancestry ($).

Naturalization. Before 1906 an immigrant could be naturalized in almost any court — the Supreme Court, the Court of Chancery, or a county Court of Common Pleas — so records are scattered; after 1906 the process was federalized. The main finding aids are New Jersey, County Naturalization Records, 1749–1986, free on FamilySearch and also on Ancestry ($); the federal naturalizations from the U.S. District Court at Newark and Trenton are held by the National Archives at Philadelphia. The State Archives holds an index to New Jersey naturalizations from 1703 to 1862.

Land Records

As a state-land state, New Jersey granted land through its proprietors rather than the federal government, so there are no General Land Office records. After the 1664 English takeover, title flowed from Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret and, following the 1676 division, from the Board of Proprietors of East Jersey at Perth Amboy and the Council of Proprietors of West Jersey at Burlington. The two boards sold land to individuals by proprietary deed and kept their own surveys, deeds, and minutes; later transfers between individuals were recorded first with the provincial secretaries and, after the Land Act of 1785, by the county clerks. It was common for deeds to go unrecorded for years, so many early transactions are missing.

Where the records are kept.

• County level: deeds and mortgages recorded since 1785 are held by the County Clerk (or Register of Deeds).
• New Jersey State Archives (Trenton): the State Archives holds the East Jersey and West Jersey proprietary records, the Secretary of State’s deeds and surveys, colonial patents, and the early land records; the East Jersey Proprietors’ records came to the Archives after that board dissolved in 1998, and the West Jersey Proprietors’ records followed.

The large proprietary grants. Because so much of the colony was distributed in large grants, knowing which tract or purchase an ancestor’s land fell in tells you where the settlement records survive.

• The Elizabethtown Purchase (1664): a grant by Governor Nicolls to settlers from Long Island of roughly 500,000 acres between the Raritan and Passaic rivers, covering present-day Union County and parts of Essex, Morris, and Somerset; its contested title produced decades of litigation.
• The Monmouth Patent (1665): Navesink-area lands granted to Baptist and Quaker settlers from Long Island and New England, the nucleus of Monmouth County.
• The East Jersey Board and West Jersey Council of Proprietors: the two boards that surveyed and sold most of the colony’s land; the Keith Line (1687) and the Lawrence Line (1743) marked the boundary between their two divisions.
• The West Jersey Society: a group of London investors who bought a large proprietary share in 1692 and financed much of West Jersey’s settlement.

Online, the New Jersey State Archives Early Land Records database indexes colonial patents, deeds, and surveys and is free, and New Jersey, Published Archives Series, 1631–1782 ($) makes the printed Calendar of Records (the abstracts of patents and deeds, 1664–1703) name-searchable. FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed deeds and patents searchable by every name they contain, including grantors, grantees, and witnesses.

Military Records

New Jersey took part in every American conflict, and because it was a principal battleground of the Revolution its early service records are especially rich; the most complete Revolutionary collection, the Adjutant General’s papers, is held at the State Archives.

• Colonial and French and Indian War: militia commissions and muster rolls were recorded in the secretary of state’s office, and typescript abstracts of colonial-war officers (1668–1774) are at the State Archives.
• Revolution: Stryker’s Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Revolutionary War is free on the Internet Archive, and the State Archives holds the compiled service cards, the Revolutionary War slips, and the Inventories of Damages by the British and Americans, 1776–1782.
• War of 1812: the published Records of Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Wars, 1791–1815 covers the militia of this period, and the State Archives holds the muster and pay records.
• Civil War: Stryker’s two-volume Record of Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Civil War, 1861–1865 is free on the Internet Archive and as a searchable roster among the New Jersey State Archives databases, which also index the Civil War payment vouchers.
• Later conflicts: the State Archives holds Spanish-American War and World War I service abstracts and the World War I death cards, and veterans’ discharge records are filed with the county clerks.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, and guardianships of minors — is among the richest sources for family relationships in New Jersey, and its custody is unusual: for the whole colonial and early state period, wills were proved centrally rather than in the county. The key dividing line is 1901.

• Before 1901: the Prerogative Court, in the hands of the governor as “ordinary” and later a dedicated court, proved wills and granted administrations statewide; the New Jersey State Archives holds all original wills and inventories from 1670 to 1900. The standard printed finding aids are the New Jersey Archives Calendar of Wills series (abstracts, roughly 1670–1817) and the three-volume Index of Wills, Inventories, Etc. … prior to 1901.
• County level: the county Surrogate’s Court kept the estate files — petitions, bonds, accounts, and distributions — that name many more people than the recorded will books; these remain with the surrogates and on FamilySearch microfilm for many counties.

Online, New Jersey, Probate Records, 1678–1980 is free on FamilySearch and browsable by county; New Jersey, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1739–1991 ($) and New Jersey, U.S., Abstract of Wills, 1670–1817 ($) are name-searchable; and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed wills and estate files searchable by every name they contain.

Tax Records

Tax records place a family in a specific township and year, and in New Jersey they carry unusual weight because the early federal censuses are missing. The tax ratables — annual lists of taxable inhabitants — are the single most valuable substitute, especially the Revolutionary-era lists.

• The colonial and state tax ratables begin with the lists of 1773–1774 and run regularly into the 1820s; the originals are almost all at the New Jersey State Archives, which has digitized nearly all of them for free online access, and they underlie Stryker-Rodda’s published Revolutionary Census of New Jersey.
• Federal Internal Revenue assessment lists (1862–1866 and later) recorded Civil War–era income, license, and luxury taxes; the New Jersey lists are available on FamilySearch and on Ancestry ($).
• Later township and county assessment rolls are held by the municipalities and county boards of taxation, with many earlier rolls at the State Archives and on FamilySearch microfilm.