Richard S Hutchinson

Abstracts of the Council of Safety Minutes State of New Jersey, 1777-1778 Richard S Hutchinson

The record of the New Jersey Council of Safety is a little known but important source for New Jersey history during the American Revolution. The function of the Council of Safety was to protect the state from the enemy while providing the militia with whatever they needed in order to fight. This work is an "abstraction" of the important proceedings found in the five volumes of the records of the New Jersey Council of Safety from March 18th, 1777 through October 8th, 1778, with a complete index of all the individuals, named therein, who appeared before them. It names the members of the Council attending a session, along with the names of those residents appearing before them, their sureties, the prisoners, those persons who voluntarily went over to the "enemy" in New York City or who were forcibly removed from New Jersey, and those who moved into enemy's lines, including the names of their wives and children when so indicated. It names those persons securing the warning beacons, the lead, the flints, those making the bullets, the names of the millers, the coopers, and other professions, and it names those paid for guarding the Council, and some of the wounded soldiers and their doctors and/or wives and other care-givers when they were named. The importance of this work is that it now gives the researcher the names of those people who had the fortune or misfortune to appear before the Council of Safety. It is an untapped source for the genealogist working on New Jersey family histories during this period of the Revolution.