Jersey's Pride: Its Archivists

Spent yesterday afternoon in the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton -- my first full day on a week-long research & conference trip here in New Jersey.  I'll be doing archival research for a few days and then Friday I'll be participating in the "Conquest to Identity" conference hosted by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the New Jersey Historical Commission, and Kean University.

The people at the archive were super helpful and super knowledgeable -- so much so that I'll have to go back soon. At first they wondered -- as so many people do -- why I would be interested in manuscripts about colonial surveying, but when they heard my pitch, they got it immediately and started pulling out all kinds of good stuff. They even set up one of their own counter-top computers so I could look at some obscure digitized materials that hadn't yet been made widely available. One archivist shared with me her research on a crooked eighteenth-century surveyor-official who tried to use his position to steal another man's land. I'll be heading up to Princeton today to check out their collection of James Alexander papers (and maybe track down an old prof or two). But I'll be heading back to the NJSA tomorrow to dig around more in the New Jersey proprietary records, which are a treasure trove of materials on land and surveying. Many thanks to the NJSA staff for introducing them to me.