Owning New Jersey: Historic Tales of War, Property Disputes & the Pursuit of Happiness

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Grabas, Joseph A.
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	Owning New Jersey by Joseph A. Grabas tells state history with a focus on land and place. From a professional title searcher's vantage point, Grabas argues that New Jersey's history is " underpinned by landownership, " and therefore records of land transactions, such as deeds, mortgages, etc., are a rich source for revealing its history. Land transfers do that in the myriad detail of the chain of title and financing of each land parcel, transferred over the centuries of New Jersey's existence from person to person, each record being a snapshot in time of people and their relationships and circumstances. He also contends that such records are largely untapped for this purpose. The book occupies a middle ground between a scholarly and a popular work; written in an informal style, but uses both primary and secondary sources. This engaging book tells largely untold tales that a general audience will appreciate, but also distinguishes itself by highlighting the value of a particular source—land records—in uncovering history. The stories he has discovered, or re-told from the perspective of land transactions, are on scales ranging from the state's general political history to one of the individual lives of New Jersey's everyday folks and elites, who were trying to get ahead by owning land. The sampling of subjects inclusively spans across geography, time, class, race and gender. He begins with a chapter on New Jersey's nativity in the 1664 deed from the Duke of York to John Lord Berkeley and George Carteret. He reviews prior European settlement by explaining the New Netherland adventure (but omitting to mention New Sweden in the Delaware Valley). Nevertheless, that and his discussion of the English feudal system and the revolution in
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://njs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/njs/article/download/33/34
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://njs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/njs/article/download/33/34
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article