Tuesday, October 5, 2010

New Jersey State Library Digital Collections

Diane Haddad, on The Genealogy Insider blog, points us to the Family Tree Magazine article by David Fryxell titled 2010 Best State Websites.  The article is free to read (I saved it as a Favorite).

I went looking for information about New Jersey, in the New Jersey State Archives Digital Collection online at http://www.njstatelib.org/NJ_Information/Digital_Collections/.

The categories in this collection include:
  • Afro-Americans in New Jersey
  • Annual Report of the Inspector of Factories and Workshops, 1883-1904
  • Battles and Skirmishes of the American Revolution in New Jersey
  • Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries of New Jersey Annual Reports, 1878-1917
  • Corporations of New Jersey:List of Certificates to December 31, 1911
  • Forums Institute for Public Policy Issue Briefs
  • History of the New Jersey A.M.E. Church
  • Modern Forms of Municipal Governments
  • Morgan's History of the New Jersey Conference
  • Municipalities in New Jersey by County
  • New Jersey City Directories at the New Jersey State Library
  • New Jersey Constitutional Convention Proceedings 1947
  • New Jersey in the American Revolution 1763-1783: A Chronology
  • New Jersey in the American Revolution 1763-1783: A Documentary History
  • New Jersey Legislature 2000-2001
  • New Jersey Legislature 2002-2003
  • New Jersey's Revolutionary Experience
  • Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Revolutionary War
  • Report of the Attorney General's Task Force on Sovereign Immunity
  • Report to the Governor on the Subject of Tort Reform
  • Record of Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Civil War, 1861-1865
  • Report of the Study Commission on Parole
  • The Governors of New Jersey 1664-1974: Biographical Essays
  • The New Jersey African American History Curriculum
  • The Origin of New Jersey Place Names
  • Trenton Illustrated

 Each one of those topics has one or more articles, in PDF format, available to read online (and save to your hard drive if you wish).  Unfortunately, the articles are not searchable - they seem to be created from images of the original printed pages and the PDF search feature doesn't work on them.  Too bad!
 
Still, these articles provide a significant body of work about the history of the state of New Jersey.  I enjoyed reading about Revolutionary War Loyalists (seeking information about William Hutchinson, one of my Loyalist ancestors) and about the Fortunes of War and Women during the Revolutionary War.  Someone interested in colonial history could spend hours reading material in the Revolutionary War collection alone. 
 
Check out the Family Tree Magazine article and see if there are digitized articles or data available for your ancestral families. 

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