The Colonial Conveyances is a listing, with some notes, of every deed recorded in New Jersey between 1660 and 1780. It is an incredible resource. The story of how it came to be begins during the run up to the Bicentennial in 1976 when the East Jersey Proprieters decided that a good project for the times would be to type all the data from the deed cards at the Archives up into a spreadsheet like document. The result was a hefty two volume work that was copied and distributed to a number of libraries, apparently mostly at historical societies, across New Jersey. The pdf linked here was taken from the copy, now part of the Bill Leap Collection at Stockton College Library, made for the Gloucester County Historical Society. That copy, already somewhat worn by the early 1980s was copied by GCHS and the original ended up in the sale bin at a bargain price. The books were then purchased by Claire Leap as a birthday present for her husband Bill Leap. Leap, a noted local historian, used the Conveyances to doresearch on various topics for many years. About 10 years ago he loaned me the two volumes so I could scan them. I did this using an OCR product which did not do what I wanted but did allow me to create a pdf of the material. The file is huge, 360 megabytes or so after compression and even on broadband it requires 15 minutes to download to your desktop or to your browser. Frankly, the only reason to do the latter is if you lack space on your hard drive. You can always figure that viewing the thing at home, even with a 15 minute wait each time, is still better than having to go out to a county historical society to use it. Anyway, Here's the file. Right click or (pc) or control click (mac) to get the pop-up menu and choose download linked file or just click on the link and wait for the pdf to load into your browser. The current version has been made into a searchablePDF and thus more useful and entertaining, by Pete Stemmer.

The New Jersey Colonial Conveyances

So, I apologize for the inconvenience. I'll try to make things better when or if I can but, for whatever it's worth, this resource is more accessible than it was:)