Use your Jersey City Free Public Library card to access one of the world's largest online document collections comprising millions of U.S. censuses, birth, death, marriage, military, immigration records and more. Online access available until the end of December 2021.
Online Search Process for Census Records by Address, 1900 – 1940 (1950 coming in 2022!)
Census records allow us to “put people in houses” in the years that the censuses were taken. Who lived there, what relations they were to each other, where they and their parents were born and what occupation they were engaged in – these elements add life to the history of a house. Up until a few years ago, this process required consulting maps and sometimes municipal meeting minutes for district boundaries, and scrolling through microfilm of the census sheets. Thanks to data structuring work by Steve Morse and digitization hosting by the Latter Day Saints (and others), the process can also be done from any computer with Internet access. It is a bit complex and the last step still requires scrolling through images, but when successful the results are rewarding.
The attached document describes how to use the tool created by Steve Morse and his team of volunteers, found at https://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html
Former New Jersey Room manager Cynthia Harris has been developing the high school yearbook collection since 2003, pursuing a full collection estimated at more than 2,500 books from the public, private, and charter high schools that have taught Hudson County students since the early 1900s.
As of September 1, 2019, there are 1,748 yearbooks in this ever-growing collection for the New Jersey Room. Maybe you’d like to contribute yours? Just a loan of your yearbook to photocopy it for the collection would be greatly appreciated.
As Harris told the Jersey Journal in a June 27, 2011 article, the yearbooks are “incredibly useful for genealogy.” She attributes her interest in yearbooks to her 25-year career as a Jersey City public school teacher.
Since beginning the yearbook search with Jersey City, Harris has extended the scope of the search to include all Hudson County communities. The books are being used to create – through the hard work of volunteers – a database of everyone who ever graduated in Hudson County. The list contains over 200,000 names and continues to grow. Please let us know if you have a yearbook to donate, or if you would like to volunteer to input the names into our databases when the library reopens fully to the public.
Name Indexes for High Schools - A Work in Progress
As part of an ongoing project collecting all the yearbooks from Hudson County high schools, New Jersey Room staff are compiling indexes to help genealogy researchers find photos and information about earlier generations. Currently available indexes are for Jersey City High School (now Dickinson High School) from 1876-1900 and Hudson County private high schools (for example, Hasbrouck Institute, Bergen School, Stevens/Hoboken Academy) 1856-1986.
The first installment lists ALL the graduates of Jersey City High School (now Dickinson HS) from 1876-1900.
Browse Names - Jersey City (Dickinson) High School:
The second installment compiles graduates of the private High Schools of Hudson County (excluding the Catholic Schools) from ca. 1856 through 1986.
These schools include the Hasbrouck Institute, the Bergen School, Stevens-Hoboken Academy, and Jersey Preparatory School.(Names vary according to when mergers occurred.) Updates will be made as more listings are acquired. For further information, contact the NJ Room at 201.547.4503.
Browse names - Private High Schools (not including Catholic schools):
Digitized as part of the New Jersey Digital Newspaper Project and hosted by the Library of Congress as part of Chronicling America.
Use search from the title heading link above, or browse by issue (date).
Though in existence for less than 20 years, the Jersey City News covers an eventful time in history. The NJ Newspaper Project is setting high standards for microfilm digitization.
This database provides access to scanned microfilm of over 87,000 pages from 22 newspapers (some being related titles), starting with the Bergen County Gazette & Advertiser of Sept. 15, 1829 through the Jersey City Argus of March 23, 1891. Many titles only existed for a year or two before changing names or going out of business. The American Standard and its successor the Argus, on the other hand, were continuous from late 1859 to early 1891.
Digitized by the library through Advantage Archives using an automated scanning process, the database provides images of similar quality to the microfilm, unlike the more labor intensive process used for Chronicling America. While a search function is available and useful, we suggest also browsing through the images as humans are, for now, better at reading print that was microfilmed from poor quality originals than the OCR "robots" are..