The second issue of 2025 features a look at the early history of New Jersey, a state which was home to several of my ancestors.

● Mining Genealogical Gold: Finding Historical Records of New Jersey (and the stories behind them). Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, was only two years old when the Dutch, citizens of one of the wealthiest and most culturally advanced nations in Europe – who had already successfully established commercial relations with the Far East – were ready to seek their fortune and establish new territories in the New World. That they instead landed on what would one day be American soil (New Jersey) was purely accidental. In reality they were hoping to discover, by sailing across the Atlantic, a northwest passage which would take them to what explorers called the East Indies.

● Separating Fact From Fiction: Anatomy of a Family Legend. More than likely you have one or more of them in your family, a “legend” or family story, passed down through the years to successive generations. It may inspire you to prove or disprove – or it might just lead you down the proverbial rabbit hole, à la Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Personally, I have a number of family legends to pursue (should I choose to do so), but one in particular seems implausible for a number of reasons, although if true is quite fantastical. 

● Crossed Swords in the Cockpit of the Revolution (Patriots vs. Loyalists: a civil war in Jersey). In the early 1770s no one traveling the roads between New York City and Philadelphia through New Jersey, the British province referred to as “the garden of America”, could have imagined that before the decade came to an end a spirited revolution, a “civil war” if you will, could ever displace the idyllic, peaceful region with bloody battlefields. Nor could anyone imagine that not only would the landscape be scarred, but so too the relationships with cherished friends and family. Some would remain friends while others would become bitter foes.

● The Dash: Margaret Kemble Gage (1734-1824). As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding (and having just commemorated the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride), one woman, a “Jersey girl”, once referred to as “a daughter of liberty unequally yoked in politics” by Reverend William Gordon, may have in fact been what a recent New York Post article called “the revolution’s Deep Throat.”

Enjoy the issue!  The next issue will actually be a reprise of two previous issues in which I featured Oklahoma (2018) and Colorado (2019). At the time I didn’t include a “Mining Genealogical Gold” article in either so I will be adding that, plus selecting a article or two from each of the previous issues (and perhaps another original article or two) since many might not have been subscribers in the early days of Digging History Magazine.