Thanks to blogs found at ResearchBuzz and Syracuse.com, I ran across a new database at the New Jersey State Department website that I’m sure my readers will want to know about – and just in time for Memorial Day!
The website is titled “Civil War Treasury Vouchers, 1861-1865,” and it includes over 9,300 Soldiers’ discharge certificates for final pay, affidavits from heirs for pay due over 1400 dead soldiers, and quarterly returns listing dependents who received subsistence payments during the war. The following is from the site itself:
The processing and indexing of New Jersey’s Civil War vouchers was made possible by the New Jersey Civil War Heritage Association (NJCWHA). This non-profit organization supplied a corps of volunteers to sort, flatten and folder nearly 16,000 documents, and—through grant funds from the New Jersey Historical Commission—contracted for the creation of a database to index them. New Jersey State Archives gratefully acknowledges the work of the NJCWHA volunteers: Laurie Berg, Louis “Jim” Bordonaro, Jack FitzPatrick, Leroy Bruce Jones, Charles Larkin and Joseph Seliga.
New Jersey’s Civil War-period treasury vouchers collection includes 15,770 payment receipts for military expenditures and wartime purchases made by the State of New Jersey from 1861 through 1866. It includes soldiers’ discharge certificates for final pay (over 9,300 items), affidavits of family members for pay due to deceased soldiers (over 1,400 items), and quarterly returns of the counties and cities listing the names of soldiers’ families and dependant mothers who received subsistence pay during their service. In all, nearly 114,000 index entries provide access to the content of the documents.
You may search by any combination of Last Name, First Name, Regiment, County, and/or Years. Entering the initial letter or string of letters into the Name Fields will return all records beginning with that string. To search on a string within a name, simply type “%” followed by the string. The spelling of personal names in the vouchers is often inconsistent and it advisable to try variant spellings. Where possible cross references to variant spellings for soldiers found in William S. Stryker’s Record of Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (Trenton, NJ: 1876) is provided, and the database automatically searches them. The Stryker variants, when applied, are given at the end of the voucher description.
For more information about the vouchers and other Civil War Era records held at the Archives please consult the Civil War Collections referenced in our catalog. See also Civil War Grant Project.
Result sets are limited to 500 records.
To order copies from this database click “Select” next to each record. A list of selected records will appear at the bottom of the page. Then click “Print Order Form”. A maximum of 5 Records may be selected per request.
I searched on the surname “Crane,” getting 103 hits. Following is a screen shot of the first few items:
