Poor House records are a valuable source of genealogical information. Poor house records contain records of deaths of those landless farmers and their families. Unfortunately, sometimes the Overseers allowed people to just report how many coffins they had made for the poor without any names associated with the coffins, while other records such as the order in 1839 state that they paid for a coffin for Sophia Fisher. That doesn’t tell you a lot unless you are looking at Fishers and, unexpectedly, the census records show the wife as being a lot younger than she was ten years earlier or Fisher’s husband is shown in another record with a name different than seen previously. There are a lot of clues in Poor House records when you study them, but there are also frustrating records such as when a coffin was provided for Mary Cartwright – Cartwright being a common name in Camden County and Mary being an extremely common name.
The records are arranged chronologically. The author has standardized the spelling of some surnames. A full-name index adds to the value of this work.
Sharon Rea Gable
2024, 7x10, paper, index, 118 pp.
ISBN: 9780788428630
101-G2863
