Not sure if you all saw this from earlier in the week. If not, enjoy!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Denise Wells <scindianagenweb(a)gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 7:40 AM
Subject: Fwd: The Legal Genealogist: A birthday present from New Jersey
To: scnewjersey(a)gmail.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jim <nyclvr2012(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 12:14 PM
Subject: Fwd: The Legal Genealogist: A birthday present from New Jersey
To: Denise Wells <scindianagenweb(a)gmail.com>
Very interesting!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Legal Genealogist <jgr.research(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 12:08 PM
Subject: The Legal Genealogist: A birthday present from New Jersey
To: nyclvr2012(a)gmail.com
The Legal Genealogist: A birthday present from New Jersey
<
http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog>
------------------------------
A birthday present from New Jersey
<
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheLegalGenealogist/~3/e38YdvhqnkA/?utm_so...
Posted: 25 Jun 2014 06:43 AM PDT
*350 years of records*
We are brash, we are loud and we are always a bit confused.
How else can you live in a state with a football stadium where not one, but
two different professional teams play… and both of them take their names
from a city that isn’t even located in the state?
Where all of the television stations are located across a river to the
north and east or the south and west?
Where you pay a toll to leave, but not to enter?
And where, yesterday, we celebrated a big, bold, brash birthday?
We are New Jersey, and yesterday was our 350th birthday.
[image: NJ Archivist Joseph Klett with West Jersey Proprietors records]
NJ Archivist Joseph Klett with West Jersey Proprietors records
All across the state, at noon, we rang our church bells, blew our sirens,
even blew the shofar, for a full minute in celebration of the day, 350
years ago, when James, Duke of York, relinquished lands he’d received from
Charles II to Sir George Carteret and John, Lord Berkeley. The lands were
described as “all that tract of land adjacent to New England, and lying and
being to the westward of Long Island, and Manhitas Island and bounded on
the east part by the main sea, and part by Hudson’s river, and hath upon
the west Delaware bay or river, and extendeth southward to the main ocean
as far as Cape May at the mouth of the Delaware bay.”1
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-1>
Three hundred and fifty years of history.
And three hundred and fifty years of records.
Starting with the most amazing set of records imaginable: the records of
the Proprietors of East and West Jersey.
You see, the original colony of New Jersey was divided into two parts.
Governance of East Jersey was centered in Perth Amboy, which became the
provincial capital in 16862
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-2> and in
Burlington for West Jersey.3
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-3>
The Proprietors of those two provinces gave up the right to try to govern
the “increasingly restless and riotous” residents4
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-4> but kept
the right to control the land.
And do you know how long the Proprietors kept control of at least some New
Jersey land?
Here’s the answer:
In 1998, the East Jersey Proprietors—then New Jersey’s oldest
corporation—dissolved and sold their rights to unappropriated land to the
state’s Green Acres program. … The West Jersey Proprietors continue as an
active corporation based in Burlington, NJ, and retain legal ownership of
their original records.5
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-5>
That’s right. Right up to today in West Jersey, to 1998 in East Jersey.
Now think about all those years… and all those records. And, as New
Jersey’s State Archivist Joseph R. Klett explains, when the East Jersey
Proprietors dissolved, “the East Jersey records were transferred from Perth
Amboy to the State Archives in Trenton. In December 2005, the West Jersey
Proprietors deposited their records with the State Archives as well, thus
uniting all of New Jersey’s colonial land records under one roof.”6
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-6>
What can you find in those records? Klett describes them this way:
The records of the East and West Jersey Proprietors document over three
hundred and forty years of land transactions and settlement in New Jersey.
While the earliest volumes of proprietary deeds, surveys and government
commissions were united in the office of the Secretary of State at the time
or soon after Trenton was established as the state capital in 1790, a large
volume of books containing just surveys or warrants and certain other early
records were retained by the proprietors.
Since the recording of land conveyances is and has always been voluntary,
and since this function was not fully available in the county seats until
1785 for deeds and 1766 for mortgages, proprietary survey records are vital
for documenting colonial land-owning families. Throughout the records are
buried innumerable genealogical facts and connections. …(V)ery little has
been published in terms of abstracts or transcripts of the proprietary land
records…7 <#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fn-8236-7>
Minutes of the Proprietors — 1685 to 1998 for East Jersey and 1688 to 1951
for West Jersey — are in the collection. Deeds and wills, surveys and
warrants, road books, quit-rent records, dividend records, maps and account
books exist for East Jersey. Minutes, account books, surveys and warrants,
rules and regulations, fee books, maps and drawing for West Jersey.
A veritable treasure trove of colonial records…
All available — at least in part, already (some processing and cataloguing
remains to be done) — at the New Jersey State Archives.
Consider it a present from the birthday state of New Jersey to anyone with
colonial ancestors from here.
------------------------------
*SOURCES*
1. “The Duke of York’s Release to John Lord Berkeley, and Sir George
Carteret, 24th of June, 1664
<
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nj01.asp>,” *The Avalon Project*,
Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library (
http://avalon.law.yale.edu:
accessed 24 June 2014). ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-1>
2. Joseph R. Klett, “Using the Records of the East and West Jersey
Proprietors <
http://www.nj.gov/state/archives/pdf/proprietors.pdf>,” New
Jersey State Archives (2008), PDF at 6 (
http://www.nj.gov/state/archives/pdf/proprietors.pdf : accessed 24 June
2014). ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-2>
3. See ibid., PDF at 1, 7. ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-3>
4. Joseph R. Klett, “The Founding of New Jersey
<
http://officialnj350.com/the-founding-of-new-jersey/>,” *The Official
NJ350 Blog*, posted 20 June 2014 (
http://officialnj350.com/category/the-official-nj350-blog/ : accessed 24
June 2014). ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-4>
5. Klett, “Using the Records of the East and West Jersey Proprietors,”
PDF at 1. ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-5>
6. Ibid. ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-6>
7. Ibid. ↩
<#146d7fa2aaf8138a_146d3ce2339660e7_146d3c8bf28865b5_fnref-8236-7>
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Denise
State Coordinator, INGenWeb
www.ingenweb.org