These five volumes, two providing a wide range
of colonial source material and three presenting compiled genealogies,
constitute at the same time an essential reference work for Monmouth County, New
Jersey, and an important broader source for the early years of New Jersey, New
York and New England.
The author began the work as a study of the Stillwell family, but soon
discovered that he needed to broaden his research to many related and associated
families, and so ended up with a collection of materials on many records and
families of Monmouth County. He also went beyond this to include data on these
same families in their earlier residences in New York and New England. Many of
the early residents of the county came from Long Island and Rhode Island.
The bulk of the material in the first two volumes consists of transcripts of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church records, town records and land
records for Monmouth County, New Jersey, and for its two earliest towns,
Shrewsbury and Middletown. There are in addition court records from Staten
Island, from the West Riding of Yorkshire on Long Island (covering what are now
Staten Island and Kings County), from Burlington County, New Jersey, and from
Cape May, New Jersey. There are also church and census records from Staten
Island.
In the final three volumes of the set, Stillwell sets forth compiled genealogies
for about fifty Monmouth County families. In most cases he provides details on
the arrival of the families in North America, and their earlier history before
coming to New Jersey. Especially in the early generations, these sketches have
much biographical material, in most instances supported by extracts from or
references to contemporary source material. In some instances there are even
extracts from English records, giving the origins of some families before
arriving in the New World.
