Hello everyone,
Just recently I did a search at
http://google.books.com hoping to find some
new material for Cape May County. I found an out of copyright book, Calendar
of New Jesey Wills 1730-1750 issued by the Archives of New Jersey. It is a
wonderful resource filled with will extractions. I also downloaded several
other books related to New Jersey history or genealogy chock full of great
site resource material.
The really neat thing about all this is, at the time I took on Cape May, I
knew I had ancestral ties to Burlington County back in the colonial days but
no clue that there were ties to Cape May until I started extracting the Cape
May wills from the above mentioned book. Lo and behold there was the will of
Charles Dennis, the brother of my 8th great grandfather!
Also, the Allen County Public Library has recently uploaded the 1860 and
1870 Census Images by state in PDF format to the Internet Archives
http://www.archive.org and they are available for download. Each file
contains the images of one roll of microfilm, the files are fairly large so
it would be a daunting task for anyone on a dialup, but not to bad for a
hi-speed or broad band connection.
Needless to say these two resources have allowed me to add quite a few pages
of new info to Cape May. Now if I could just find cemetery surveys I would
be so happy, but I will take what I can get.. Since I live in Florida, its
not like I can just run out to a cemetery and start taking pictures!!! LOL
There is also a fellow who has been archiving the GEOcities websites.
http://www.reocities.com,
so if you have or had links to sites there,check and see if he has them
archived, just substitute an r for the g in the url. I have been contacting
the owners of those sites that I was linked to on other websites asking
permission to use their material if they have not placed it elsewhere with
great success, and if they have put it online elsewhere, updating the links.
Another note about Google... if you haven't checked out Google Docs, you
should (you need a google account for this), you can create forms that
report to a spreadsheet, which are great for creating things like obit, will
or deed extractions or Surnames that you can then put on your county sites,
creat presentatons that can be embedded in an html page for viewing on your
sites. The uses are virtually endless, I encourage you to check it out!
Just thought I would share this with you all in the hopes it might help
someone else.
Laverne Tornow
Cape May County Coordinator