New Jersey Marriage Index 1901-2016

Alec Ferretti, a budding genealogist, took upon himself the task of filing an OPRA request with the New Jersey Department of Health, seeking the marriage indices that legally should have been made available to the public (based on the law) but had not been. After being denied his request, he sought the help of genealogist’s newest friends, Reclaim the Records. They with their legal team helped Alec successfully challenge the denial, and to make this story short, though it wasn’t, they were able to get the indices available opened to the public and published on Archive.org. The setup at archive, not being conducive to a quick search, I have provided the links straight to the data, along with explanation text as provided by Reclaim the Records. 1

This data is public records. Feel free to download and keep personal copies of all of the records. The records reference “locality codes” in a column for which county the marriage was filed with. You need to use the following to determine the county:

New Jersey Marriage Index – Brides 1901-1999

Locality Codes for 1949-1984 (match to first 4 numbers of locality code in data below)

This data is not complete. The 1930’s lack specific lists of marriages indexed by bride:

  1. 1930-1935 Surnames E-Z
  2. 1936-1939 All Surnames
  3. 2000 All Surnames

New Jersey Marriage Index – Grooms 1901-1999

This data is not complete. They lack specific lists of marriages indexed by groom:

  1. 1936-1948 All Surnames

New Jersey Marriage Index – 2001-2016

The 2001-2016 section of the New Jersey marriage index was held in an actual state database. Because the state had created these PDF’s by doing a print-to-file directly from their real database, you can do an actual text-search in these 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.


Citations:

  1. Read more at the Reclaim the Records Seventeenth newsletter[]

Collection:
AccessGenealogy.com United States Vital Records.

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