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, while 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.)

Every year from 1901-2000 has a Brides Index, which means that the file is listed alphabetically by the bride’s surname or maiden name. Many (but not all!) years from 1901-2000 also have a Grooms Index, which is alphabetical by the groom’s surname. This means that most years, but not all years, have double coverage. For some reason, all the Brides Index data survived for all years, but the Grooms were not so lucky. Still, once this information eventually gets transcribed into a real database, this discrepancy won’t matter so much because almost every record lists both sets of names.

There are a small number of years in the mid-1930’s where the Grooms Index doesn’t exist anymore and the Brides Index had to be scanned from six microfilm rolls that we had to get from the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton. The awesome people at FamilySearch once again stepped up and graciously volunteered to digitally scan these six microfilms for us for free. Thank you, FamilySearch!

Finally, the 2001-2016 section of the New Jersey marriage index (oooooh, twenty-first century data!) was held in an actual state database, not just a four-generations-removed digitization of a microfilm of a dot-matrix print-out of an old database. We received the records for those years in PDF format, one file per year, but because the state had created those PDF’s by doing a print-to-file directly from their real database, you can do an actual text-search in those 2001-2016 files right now if you download those PDF’s to your computer. That’s good to remember, because these 2001-2016 files are not in any kind of alphabetical order at all, they’re just roughly chronological.

As you can see from the varied example images, these records are in multiple formats, with the data layout changing about once a decade. Some of the records give the exact dates of the marriage, some have the date the license was applied for, some have the month and the year but not the day, and some just have the year. Some of the records give the exact municipality of the marriage, some just give a county, some don’t list any locality at all, and some list a numeric locality code. To make things even more confusing, the state has used at least two different sets of locality codes over the years. Here’s a link to the old list of locality codes that were used between 1949 and 1984, which New Jersey genealogist Michelle Tucker Chubenko was able to dig up for everyone (thanks, Michelle!). And here’s the list with the the modern version of the locality codes, although we’re not 100% sure that this one started in 1985.

One more thing: this record set runs all the way up through 2016. That means that this is the very first public or genealogical marriage database anywhere that includes same-sex couples! We’ve looked around online, and we don’t see any other databases anywhere that include this, not on any website; Ancestry’s Vermont marriage database is probably the one that came closest, but even that one ends a year before their law changed.

In New Jersey, the government started legally recognizing same sex-marriages in September 2013. This means that if you’re using this marriage index for any point after late 2013, the header row that labels people as Bride or Groom is invalid; from that point forward, anybody could be Spouse #1 or Spouse #2, including opposite-sex couples who might have preferred to switch the order on the marriage license paperwork. The state apparently never updated the database field names, and did not add any new columns to record each spouse’s sex.

And one more thing to note about the 2001-2016 portion of the marriage index: that data spans across two pages, not just one. See that layout below?

Well that layout is missing four more columns of data, which are on the next page!

So do be careful to check at least one page ahead, too.

So, how did we get 115 years of New Jersey records? Well, in this case we all owe a huge debt to a mild-mannered genealogist who, probably much like you, was just totally fed up with the government wrongly withholding records from the public. But rather than just being frustrated, he decided to do something about it. This is a story about how one genealogist can make a difference.

Meet Alec Ferretti

He may look young, but Alec Ferretti been a serious genealogist for more than a decade. Alec is a graduate student at New York University’s Dual Degree Program with LIU, in which he is earning two Masters Degrees simultaneously, one in Archives and Public History, and one in Library Science. He’s a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and recently won third place in their Young Professional Scholarship contest. In this photo, we catch a rare glimpse of the genealogist in his native environment amongst the microfilms at the NYC Municipal Archives.

Alec was inspired by our work at Reclaim The Records using Freedom of Information laws to force government archives and agencies to release copies of important archival documents back to the public. In fact, Alec was so inspired that he decided to launch his own public records requests!

He started looking around for states where the birth, marriage, and/or death index — just the basic index, not certificates — were not easily available to the public. Unfortunately, far too many states have some or all of these indices unavailable to researchers. Alec lives in New York, so he had started his search in the northeast and he quickly hit upon the issue of New Jersey’s marriage index.

Alec researched New Jersey’s state law OPRA, the Open Public Records Act, which is their state’s equivalent of New York’s FOIL, the Freedom of Information Law. He then researched New Jersey’s vital records laws, to see what they had to say about birth, marriage, and death records — and their indices. Most states have strict rules about who can access vital records (and when, and how, and how much it will cost per copy), but most states forgot to explicitly restrict the index or finding aid to those same records.

New Jersey is one of those states. Alec realized that while the actual text of the state vital records law seals the marriage certificates as private, it also directs the state to create an index to all marriages, for all counties that have a population more than five thousand people. Well, in New Jersey, every county has a population above five thousand people! And this law further uses the phrase “…which record shall be preserved as a public record” to refer to this index.

In other words, Alec had just figured out that the New Jersey marriage index was always supposed to have been a public record! You can read it for yourself in NJ Rev Stat § 26:8-44 (2013), otherwise known as New Jersey Revised Statutes, Title 26 – Health and Vital Statues: Section 26:8-44 – Indexing, tabulation and preservation of records by State registrar.

So Alec filed an OPRA request with the New Jersey Department of Health on April 26, 2017, asking for a copy of the index. But they denied his request.

So Alec turned to the New Jersey Government Records Council (the GRC) and asked them for an Advisory Opinion about the matter, which is a non-binding but very helpful ruling on some of the facts of the case. But in late May, the GRC told him they couldn’t provide a legal opinion one way or the other because there was essentially no previous case law about this issue for them to go on.

And that’s when Alec realized that he was going to need to bring in the big guns to launch Ferretti v. NJ Dep’t of Health — Office of Population Health, as a Denial of Access Complaint. This would essentially send the case to mediation, which is an option that some other states (including New York) don’t offer. But there was a catch: the backlog of cases meant that it might take up to a year before they heard his case, unless he wanted to file a motion in the New Jersey Supreme Court. Either way he was going to need help, both legally and financially.

And that’s where Reclaim The Records enters the story as something more than just an inspiration. Alec e-mailed us and told us what he’d done so far, and could we maybe help him? Could we set him up with an attorney for either mediation or help him move the case to court?

Well, of course, we said HECK YES we will help you reclaim those records!

So we set up phone calls with Alec, and phone calls with our attorneys. And amongst our Board of Directors we discussed the situation and decided to set aside money and time to fight for these records in mediation and in court, if need be. Alec informed the GRC he would move on to mediation, and the Department of Health agreed. They attempted to set a mediation date for late August or early September, 2017.

On July 11, 2017, the Deputy Attorney General of New Jersey, Angela Juneau-Bezer, took up the case on behalf of the state. This was a little bit intimidating, but we were still prepared to go to court if we had to. Those records were supposed to be open, after all, and we would fight for them. We’d already won the New York City marriage index last year; why shouldn’t New Jersey have an open index too?

But one week later, a small miracle happened. The Deputy Attorney General decided that there was no need to go to mediation after all. She would drop the state’s refusal and the New Jersey marriage index would be legally declared to be available to the public. She would instruct the Department of Health to put all the files on a small hard drive and send it to Alec in the mail, along with an invoice for the cost of the records and the drive. She thought the total costs might be about $675.

Now, that might sound like a lot of money, but really, a one-time charge to get about five million records and 115 years of data released to the public domain forever, plus avoiding all the costs of litigation? That sounded like a very good deal. Reclaim The Records made plans to reimburse Alec for the cost of these records, with his agreement that they would go online for free without any kind of usage restrictions, and we got our credit card ready.

And then? Another small miracle. New Jersey did something very un-Jersey-like and suddenly decided they wouldn’t charge a dime: not for the records, not for the labor, not for the hard drive, and not even for the shipping. They just gave us the data! We’d won everything and in the end it hadn’t cost us a thing — except for time and stress.

Why did they do this? We can only speculate, but it could be that New Jersey realized that they would lose the OPRA case, had we gone to the Supreme Court. New Jersey is one of only a handful of states where a requestor who wins an open records lawsuit will also automatically win payment of all their attorneys fees and court costs. This is unusual; in most other states, including New York, the decision whether to award attorneys fees is a totally separate question from whether the records were being wrongfully withheld from the public.

Alec sent us a copy of the data as soon as he received it. We started to put it all online at the Internet Archive.

And then we realized a few years were missing. The New Jersey Department of Health did not have a complete set of their own state marriage index! They were missing a number of the Grooms Index files for many years, and worse, they were missing the mid-1930’s entirely!

Luckily, we were able to figure out that the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton had copies of the missing years of data on microfilm. Alec reached out to their executive director Joseph Klett, who is himself a dedicated genealogist, and they agreed to make us copies of the six missing microfilms at the low low cost of $35 per film, which was incredibly nice of them. The similarly nice people at FamilySearch then agreed to scan the microfilms for us, and the six missing Brides Index microfilms went online a few months later in December 2017.

We also gave a heads-up e-mail to some friends in the genealogical community about the impending data release. (Special shout-out to all the people in the New Jersey genealogy Facebook groups who knew about this index going online two months ago but who didn’t spill the beans!) All the major websites you would hope or expect to see this data will have it online eventually, and multiple transcription projects are being planned, although it may take a year or two for everything to wind up freely text-searchable.

And as for Alec? Well, he seems to have been bit by the records requesting bug, and we’re working with him on some other new projects that we can’t talk about just yet, in new states. And you should probably tell him thank you for having the great idea to go after these New Jersey records in the first place. (Or you could hire him for your northeastern US genealogy projects, or Italian or Latin American or Jewish genealogy projects, or hire him as an archivist once he finishes his two masters’ degrees…)

One more fun fact: at one point in this records fight, a New Jersey government official casually mentioned to Alec that only a New Jersey state resident could file an OPRA request. This government official was slightly misinformed, as a new court case just this past April decided that OPRA requestors no longer need to prove in-state residency. Nevertheless, Alec was never a New Jersey resident at any point during this fight; he just conveniently didn’t volunteer that fact during the proceedings, and the state officials apparently didn’t think to ask him. We in the genealogical community are the beneficiaries of his forbearance. ?

One more way to say thank you

And there’s one more thing you can do before you rush out and start using the New Jersey marriage index.

We at Reclaim The Records were able to step in and work with Alec on this project because we finally became a real 501(c)(3) registered non-profit earlier this year, and have quietly been fundraising for the past few months. We’re planning to grow and expand, to target records access fights in more states, and to do that we needed to grow up from a little not-for-profit project into a real IRS-approved non-profit organization.

This also meant that we had enough funding to feel comfortable hiring an attorney and potentially launching a new lawsuit to help Alec fight for these records, and we knew we could also pay the state the $675 invoice for the marriage index. It was only by sheer luck that we did not need to pay out either of those associated costs in this particular case, because the state suddenly decided not to go to mediation or to court, and then they didn’t even charge us for the copies of the records.

We want to keep reclaiming and publishing records like this New Jersey marriage index. And we want to keep helping genealogists like Alec with legal assistance and financial support to reclaim any new records they may discover. If another genealogist comes to us tomorrow needing help with another awesome records project, we want to be able to say yes to them too.

So we hope you’ll consider supporting Reclaim The Records so that we can keep on doing things like this.

And we thank you for your support. ?

COMING SOON.

Reclaim The Records is excited to announce that, in coordination with the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, we have acquired the microfilmed indices to approximately 445,000 vital records — births, marriages, and deaths — from the state of New Jersey. They’ve never been available to researchers outside of the Archives building before, and they’ve never been online on any websites, nor downloadable as open data.

And we’ve put them online! For free!

These records also represent (we think) the first publicly available index for any twentieth century vital records from New Jersey. The state has indexed a lot of its pre-1900 vital records, as well as some of its post-1900 non-vital records (such as lists of official name changes), and they have put those databases online for free searches. But they don’t have any of their post-1900 vital records available on any websites. They’re not in any of the major for-profit genealogical websites’ databases, and even everyone’s favorite large non-profit genealogical organization only has a selection of some birth and christening records and some limited county-level (not state-level) marriage records available post-1900, but that coverage is spotty.

So, yeah, this is big news.

The awesome, generous, amazing New Jersey State Archives has sent us copies of the following microfilms from their collection:

All of these new records being provided to us by the Archives are indices, not the actual certificates. But luckily ordering genealogical copies of the original certificates from them is easy, inexpensive, and unrestricted for these older records.

You might ask, how did you figure out approximately how many records there were? Well, a search of the web led to this document published by the State of New Jersey’s Center for Health Statistics, which compares the birth, marriage, and death rates in the state for the years 1900 and 2000. Assuming that the incidence of these events in 1901, 1902, and 1903 was not significantly different than it was in 1900, we just multiplied the 1900 numbers by three years and rounded up slightly, to account for the increasing population.

Note that the Brides Index goes all the way up to 1914, instead of stopping in 1903 like the other kinds of indices.

Who, What, Where, When, and How?!

So, you might be wondering: how did we get these records? Was it through another Freedom of Information request, filed under New Jersey’s version of the law, which they call OPRA (the New Jersey Open Public Records Act)?

Well, frankly, that was our original plan. Readers of our previous newsletter issue probably noticed that we had listed an OPRA challenge to acquire New Jersey vital records as our Records Request #5, all set to be filed in January 2016, along with many upcoming FOIL requests to various New York State and New York City agencies. (Those are still being planned, and coming soon…)

But in doing the research to figure out exactly which records to request, we had a long phone call with genealogist Michelle Tucker Chubenko. Michelle is president of the New Jersey Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists (NJ-APG) and she is extremely knowledgeable about the holdings of the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, working there for client research several times a month. She was the one who told us about these indices.

The Archives holds microfilmed copies of New Jersey vital records up through the mid-twentieth century, as well as some original paper copies through the very early twentieth century. Researchers who are onsite are free to browse the records, but an index is only available for a very small number of those records, 1901-1903 and then sometimes starting again in the 1940’s. That means that for most of the post-1904 vital records, researchers have to sit there and browse through the actual certificates within each individual year. The certificates are usually arranged in alphabetical order by surname, but sometimes are filed in Soundex order, just to keep things interesting.

And to reiterate, none of this twentieth century material is available online at all.

Reclaim the Records thought this sounded like a pretty analogous situation to the case we won against the New York City Municipal Archives back in September: indices that are available for researchers to view onsite, but nowhere else. We decided that trying to acquire copies of this small number of existing indices for 1901-1903, while not as large a year range as we would have liked, sounded like a good test case for our first usage of New Jersey’s OPRA law. The indices were relatively self-contained on a few reels of film, they were indices rather than certificates (indices would probably be easier to win under FOIL or OPRA, and actual certificates are harder), and they were old enough that we wouldn’t have to worry about privacy restrictions. And so Reclaim The Records started making plans to find an OPRA-knowledgeable attorney in New Jersey.

But then something awesome happened.

Thanks to an introduction from the resourceful Michelle, the executive director of the New Jersey State Archives Joseph R. Klett agreed to speak to Reclaim The Records on a phone call. He is a very nice guy and, as it turns out, a serious genealogist. He had heard through the grapevine about our successful FOIL case against the NYC Municipal Archives, and our plans to put those records online for free use. But unlike NYC’s position, Mr. Klett was not denying us copies of the indices, and he thought the idea of putting these indices online for free public use was a great idea!

So, in this case, we didn’t need to file an OPRA request at all, no legal maneuvering or court cases whatsoever. In the end, the New Jersey State Archives flat out sold Reclaim The Records the twenty-nine vital records index microfilms for the low, low price of $35 each. They gave us free shipping, and even threw in some free alternate copies for three rolls where some records were too light or too dark.

And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, they asked, oh, by the way, do you want copies of the 1901-1914 Brides Index too? You totally should index that data too. And we were like, uh, yeah, we’ll take it!

The whole process could not have been easier or more pleasant, and we are very thankful to Mr. Klett and the New Jersey State Archives for their decision.

Like a reel within a reel

This part won’t be as relevant once the data gets scanned and is eventually made searchable, but here’s the way the physical media is currently arranged:

NJ Birth Index:

• 1901: 4 reels
• 1902: 4 reels
• 1903: 1 reel

NJ Marriage Index – Grooms:

• 1901: 1 reel
• 1902: 1 reel (plus one extra copy scanned at a lighter setting)
• 1903: 1 reel (plus one extra copy scanned at a lighter setting)

NJ Marriage Index – Brides:

• 1901-1903: 2 reels
• 1904-1909: 6 reels
• 1910-1914: 6 reels

NJ Death Index:

• 1901: 1 reel (plus one extra copy scanned at a lighter setting)
• 1902: 1 reel
• 1903: 1 reel

Total: 29 reels of microfilm, plus three alternate reels. We’ll make sure that when these files eventually go online, links will be provided on the web pages that display the darker and lighter copies of the same reels, so researchers can easily switch back and forth to whichever reel has the better copy of the record they might need.

Wow. What’s next?

Our plan for these New Jersey indices is basically identical to our plan for the previously-acquired NYC marriage indices: put them online, for free, for everyone.

Sometime in the next few months, probably in very early 2016, the films will be digitally scanned and uploaded for free public access at the non-profit Internet Archive (archive.org).

Once that’s done, any non-profit organization, for-profit company, or individual researcher who wants to use the images of the indices is free to do so, for any purpose. You can download the entire set and re-post it on your own website, or print out the images and turn them into origami paper cranes, or whatever. There is no copyright on the data listed in the files (because the data compilation was created by the government), no copyrights on the newly-scanned images (because Reclaim The Records doesn’t believe in that sort of thing), and no usage restrictions on any of it.

COMING SOON.