Even if great granddad turns out to be an axe murderer, it makes no difference to the thousands of folks hell bent on discovering where they came from.
Despite the existence of on-line sites like ancestry.com, heritagequestonline.com, and usgenweb.org., the New Jersey Room of the Jersey City Public Library continues to be a favorite resource for anyone – not just New Jerseyites— tracking down their relatives.
That’s how TV and film star Rosie O’Donnell found herself there last November for a taping of NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? which aired on Feb. 19. That show, which helps celebrities like O’Donnell and Meryl Streep discover their pasts, is further evidence of our collective yearning for family ties.
O’Donnell found that her great-grandfather had died in Jersey City in 1903, among other information.
“People are dying for every morsel they can grab on to.” – Cynthia Harris
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“It awakened in everybody, not just African Americans, a need to look at our own roots,” Harris said.
Harris also speculates that Americans are especially interested in their origins because they come from all over the world.
“People have multiple ethnic backgrounds, and it spurs a great interest,” she said.
Counting the populace
According to Harris, the New Jersey Room has federal census records from 1830 to 1870 in hard copy. Interestingly, 1860’s is not available, probably because of the Civil War.
The census for 1890 is not available because it was stored in a warehouse in upstate New York which was destroyed by fire in 1923.
The years 1870 to 1930 are available on microfilm. The years 1940 to 2010 are not yet available. “The feds keep the personal information private for 72 years,” Harris said. Which is why the 1940 census will not be ready until next year.
A state census is done every 10 years on the 5s. The New Jersey Room has 1885, 1895, 1905, and 1915 on microfilm.
While users can sometimes find census information on ancestry websites, there is a fee, and it’s not always indexed correctly, Harris said.
Researching with the stars
Harris and fellow librarian John Beekman had been working with the producers of Who Do You Think You Are? since July on the O’Donnell case.
“We didn’t know who the celebrity was,” Harris said. “We were digging up information about her great grandfather, Michael Murtha, and didn’t find out until the day she showed up on Nov. 18. That was the only time she was here.”
Besides O’Donnell’s great grandfather, another of O’Donnell’s relatives lived here, graduating from Ferris High School in Jersey City in 1940.
“Rosie was wonderful,” Harris said. “She was very down to earth and took pictures with us.”
The celebrity factor sparked even more interest in family history.
“After the show aired,” Harris said, “we fielded a number of calls from people looking for help with genealogy.”
Other calls
Harris tells the story of an elderly woman looking for information about her parents, who would be about 120 if they were alive today. Harris looked up the census records and told the woman what she found.
“She got quiet on the phone, and I asked her if she was still there,” Harris recalled. “She was crying and had to compose herself. She was getting information that she’d lived all her life not knowing.”
At one point, one of the on-line genealogical websites suggested contacting the New Jersey Room for help, Harris said. Suddenly, “We were flooded with requests. In three days we were asked for 33 obituaries.”
Harris has volunteers printing out obits form newspapers and putting them in a database.
“Obits give a lot of clues,” Harris said. “They not only tell when the person died, but they give an insight into the life. They tell who the relatives are, and where the person was buried, so that you can contact the cemetery.”
The good, the bad, and the ugly
People on a family quest often call from other states. Two recent ones were from Maryland and Pennsylvania.
“People want to know everything they can,” Harris said. One caller, she said, wanted to know about an uncle who had been arrested. “People are like that,” Harris said. “They don’t care if it’s bad. People are dying for every morsel they can grab on to.”
In the room, researchers have access to an index with more than 100,000 names of high school graduates, old city directories, 20,000 books related to New Jersey, marriage announcements from the Jersey Journal, birth announcements, and attendance records from the grammar schools.
Another woman contacted Harris on behalf of an uncle whose father had murdered his mother. It was in the 1930s, and he and his sibling were told nothing about the crime.
“He never knew where his mother was buried,” Harris related. “It turned out that is mother was buried right here in Jersey City in Harsimus cemetery.”
The woman and her uncle came into the library to thank Harris personally with a bottle of cologne for giving the uncle closure after 70 years.
Currently Harris is working on a database of everyone who graduated from high school in Jersey City. Volunteers input the information, including nicknames. Harris said because of that little detail she was able to track down someone with the nickname Lucky.
“It fills in the gap in our yearbook collection,” she said.
History of the New Jersey Room
The New Jersey Room was established as a separate department of the main branch of the library in 1964.
Part of the impetus for that effort, according to Harris, was to house the material from the Hudson County Historical Society which had become defunct. Those materials included lectures, books, pictures, maps, and all kinds of local historical documents.
“We have old books going back 200 years,” Harris said. “There is an emphasis on Hudson County but we cover the entire state.”
As in the case, Harris related, of “a gentleman who came in last week looking for a map of Bound Brook, N.J. He’s a repeat patron who knows what’s here.”
Harris, for her part, loves what she does.
“I enjoy looking stuff up, absolutely,” she said. “It gives me a great deal of satisfaction. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Call the New Jersey Room at (201) 547-4503.
Kate Rounds can be reached at krounds@hudsonreporter.com..