Genealogy from the perspective of a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, LDS)

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Reclaim the Records liberates New Jersey Marriage Index, 1901-2016


With help from a volunteer, the Reclaim the Records organization has done it again! They have "liberated" the entire New Jersey Marriage Index for 1901-2016. Here is a quote from their 17th Newsletter:
Introducing the NEW JERSEY MARRIAGE INDEX, 1901-2016! These records are now totally digital, and totally free -- forever! Now you can research anyone who got married in the Garden State right from your home, still in your pajamas. 
We've posted these images at our favorite online library, the Internet Archive (archive.org). You can skip right to any year you want and flip through all the images, or you can download the records to your hard drive as JPG's, PDF's, and/or other formats. Each file is listed year-by-year (or occasionally by a year range), and then the marriages are listed alphabetically by surname. 
Just to be clear: these are images of the index, so this isn't a real text-searchable marriage database just yet. But rest assured that the usual genealogy websites we all know are going to start indexing projects and will make that happen eventually. (Yes, the Internet Archive does run automatic OCR on the text contained in the images, but the recognition quality isn't that great, so you're probably better off just reading through the images instead of trying to text-search.)
I am vitally interested in this effort as evidenced by the fact that my wife and I are preparing to move to the Washington, D.C. area to be full-time FamilySearch missionaries/record preservation specialists for FamilySearch and its sponsor The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our responsibilities will include helping to digitize records which will then be available to genealogists.

Here is a screenshot of the Introduction to the New Jersey Marriage Index, 1901-2016 on the Internet Archive or Archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/njmarriageindex?sort=titleSorter
I strongly suggest reading the entire newsletter article. It is really a primer about how to go about helping make even more records available across the country. 

No comments:

Post a Comment