Atlantic County New Jersey Digitized Records

The Atlantic County Library of New Jersey has a Digitized Records Collection at

http://www.atlanticlibrary.org/collections/digitized/index.asp (URL updated)

The Atlantic County library is home to thousands of historic documents which they are posting on-line as an ongoing project. This collection includes:

• Newspaper
• Immigration (1890-1930)
• Civil War
• Wills

Since my grandparents had lived in Atlantic City, NJ for about 15 years, I thought I would take a look.

Historic Newspapers
The site has about 10 different newspapers digitized. They look interesting, but they are large PDF files that are not searchable. These will take quite a bit of time to peruse but it appears to concentrate on Atlantic County happenings, so I think it will be worthwhile to take the time to do so.

Civil War Muster-Out Records
The Civil War section has the muster-out records of Atlantic County's US Civil War Veterans. This section also includes links to Civil War-era newspapers. While this is a great collection, it won't be of any value to me because my grandfather immigrated to the US after the Civil War.

Immigration Records
The immigration sections has thousands of immigration records (declarations and letters of intent) from 1890-1930 that they are indexing and posting to their website.

I've searched a long, long time for my grandfather's passenger list from Germany to the U.S. I knew he immigrated sometime between 1885 and 1889 based on information I found in the US census of 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930, but as it tends to do, the census gave me conflicting information from year to year. I have previously searched the Ancestry.com passenger lists using every search trick I knew, but with no luck. I used to joke that he must have swum over, but I can't say that anymore, because here I found a digitized image of his declaration of intent!!!! The declaration says he was on the ship Hammonia which arrived in December of 1886, but when I checked Ancestry, it has no passenger list for the Hammonia in Dec, 1886. I'll have to send for his naturalization papers which should tell me the exact date of immigration. This is a great find for me. I had previously thought he was naturalized while he lived in Philadelphia. No wonder I had never found him.

Wills
This section has Wills, Letters of Administration and Guardianship, and Minutes of Orphans Court Records. I did a quick check and didn't find anything, but I'll have to come back later when I have more time to peruse.

If you have anyone who has ever lived in Atlantic City, New Jersey, this is a wonderful collection. Happy Searching.

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