Facts on Local Church Records

Church records are just as important in New Jersey as in the other Mid-Atlantic states, but many have been lost or destroyed.

Many New Jersey church records have been published in state historical and genealogical journals, such as The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. Original and transcribed material is to be found at the New Jersey Historical Society (including the DAR collection), Rutgers, the Glouster County Historical Society, and elsewhere, and in New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania sources and libraries, particularly in the Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.

• The Historical Society of the Reformed Church in America
  21 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
  has published a Guide to Local Church Records in the Reformed Church in America and to Genealogical Resources in the Gardner Sage Library, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Local Church Archive Group Special Guide No. 1.
• University Archives, Steton Hall University
  South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ 07079
  maintains microfilm copies of parish registers from 1832 to 1914 for the Archdiocese of Newark, which until 1881 included all of New Jersey. A small research fee is charged for inquiries. Records after 1914 are in the individual parishes but are not open for research. In 1881 the archdiocese was divided, with a Southern Archdiocese in Trenton, which lost most of its records in a fire in 1956. Another split in 1937 created archdioceses at Paterson and Camden. Trenton and Camden have no archives.
• Diocesan House of the Episcopal Church
  808 West State Street, Trenton, NJ 08618
  has copies of baptismal and confirmation records from individual churches. The church archives has a full run of diocesan journals, which are not indexed but are useful for tracing clergy and convention delegates; the church newspaper; published and manuscript church histories; and fragmentary records for only eighteen of the eighty or more extinct churches.
• The Methodist church has an archives for each of its two state conferences:
  • United Methodist Church Archives, Northern New Jersey Conference
    Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue. Madison, NJ 07940
  • United Methodist Church Archives, Southern New Jersey Conference
• Bishop's Building, Pennington School, 40 Delaware Avenue, Pennington, NJ 08534.
  Inquiries about Presbyterian records should be made to the History Department, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and about Baptist records to the American Baptist Historical Society in Rochester, New York.

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Facts on Local Cemetery Records

   The important work of grave marker transcribing has been the goal of the Genealogical Society of New Jersey, which was originally formed by "Tombstone Hounds." Their core collection is at Rutgers University, where there is a card index by county and name of the cemetery as well as a "master index" arranged alphabetically by surname but only for selected cemeteries. Many of the society's transcriptions have been published in their journal, The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. Another large collection of cemetery records is that gathered by the New Jersey DAR chapters, with copies deposited at the New Jersey State Library and the New Jersey Historical Society. Both these places have other cemetery records, as do the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania and the New York Public Library. Some individual books of cemetery inscriptions have been published, and some are found in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record.

   Cemetery records and gravestone inscriptions are a rich source of information for family historians. Cemetery and other sources of information associated with death include:

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