Websites expand access to New Jersey and Pennsylvania state archives

The voucher at the New Jersey State Archives was a simple record of expenses by state officials.

But the story behind it - in late April 1865 - made it anything but routine.

Neat cursive writing logged costs incurred by the governor and his entourage as they accompanied the remains of President Abraham Lincoln from Washington to New Jersey and New York.

There were expenses for hotels, carriages, even the black crepe they wore - a total of $316.30.

About five years ago, people who wanted to see that document and other historical and genealogical records would have had to travel to the archives in Trenton.

Ten thousand made the trip every year to look up marriage, death, court, and census documents, as well Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War I records.

But in recent years, as the state created searchable databases of more than one million documents and photographs, many more people are working from home.

A quarter-million visit the State Archives on their computers each year, sometimes getting what they want immediately and other times ordering copies of documents for a fee.

The same is true in Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands use the Internet to explore the state archives in Harrisburg.

The new online visitors are not the professional educators, historians, or genealogists who usually walked through the archives' doors. They're military and history buffs, and homemakers who are checking out their family roots or are just simply curious.

Some use the websites to save time before going to the archives for more specific research of the tens of millions of documents and photos.

But the databases' popularity has reduced visits to both archives. Trenton now has from 7,000 to 8,000 visitors a year. Harrisburg reported a similar decline but had no numbers.

New Jersey's databases "are an essential gateway," said Karl Niederer, director of the state Division of Archives and Records Management. "This will be the way a significant majority of archive users will begin the process of doing their research."

"That's the business model we've adopted," he said. "We're driven by the public's expectation that that's how resources will be made available."

Web availability is especially important to researchers who would otherwise have to travel long distances to look at the records.

"Harrisburg is a long way from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh," said David Haury, director of the Bureau of Archives and History at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

"People can go online or call us to see if we have the document. The first question they ask is, 'Is that online?' "

Military and land records are among the most popular among researchers. New Jersey and Pennsylvania have documents from various conflicts, including the American Revolution, Civil War, and World War I, as well as censuses, maps, and surveys.

Unlike Pennsylvania, New Jersey has digitized photos of Civil War and World War I soldiers and images of agricultural activities. During the last five years, the state has added marriage and death records, which Pennsylvania has not yet included for public viewing.

The databases hold historic treasures for those willing to mine them. New Jersey's Civil War vouchers provide not only the costs but also descriptions, down to the lettering, of state regimental flags that were carried into battle.

"The online traffic has been building every year, partly because we keep adding things," said Joseph Klett, chief of the New Jersey State Archives. The site "is getting hits from people across the world."

State Supreme Court cases from 1704 to 1844 and marriages from 1665 to 1799 went online in 2005, followed by marriages from 1848 to 1878 in 2006 and the 1885 census for Passaic County and Atlantic City in 2007. The next year, the state added legal name changes from 1847 to 1947, Revolutionary War damages, and proprietors warrants and surveys from 1670 to 1727.

In 2009, the state provided death records from 1878 to 1886, Civil War vouchers, and Stryker's record of New Jersey soldiers during the Civil War. The most recent additions last year and this month were the agriculture photos and World War I casualties.

"The more we put on the Web, the better people will be able to do their research," Klett said. "You may decide, from a distance, that you want to order a copy. We can print it out from the microfilm."

The archive charges $5 per record for the copies. Pennsylvania charges 50 cents a page.

"We're doing data entry every day," Klett said. "We are constantly indexing and extracting data from the records and building the databases."

"It's been a primary focus of mine for the past 10 years," long before the first information went online, he said.

For researchers, everything changed in a short span of years.

"When I started my career 25 to 30 years ago, you came to the archives," Niederer said. "There was no short cut."

Now much of the archives comes to the researchers, he said, over their home computers.