Aitkin's NJ State Index of Wills, Inventories, etc. prior to 1901, Vol. III (1913) — the complete Cooper blocks of the Sussex, Warren and Morris sections, read off the page images.

Transcription and notes

Provenance, the two errors demonstrated on one of its own rows, and what that means for ordering from it are all in the source: and coverage: headers and are not repeated here.

Source identification

Abbreviations as printed: W. = Will · Inv. = Inventory · Int. = Intestate · Cod./Cods. = Codicil(s) · Wd. = Ward · Grd. = Guardianship · Acct. = Account. The letter after the file number is the county suffix — S = Sussex, U = Warren, N = Morris.

Data — SUSSEX COUNTY (suffix S), printed p. 1301

The Cooper block verbatim, with the entries immediately above and below it transcribed so that the block is demonstrably complete and not truncated by a crop:

Four Cooper entries in the whole Sussex County section. The earliest is Elias, 1846.

Data — WARREN COUNTY (suffix U), printed p. 1387-ish

Five Cooper entries in the whole Warren County section. Warren County was erected out of Sussex in 1824, so its file series begins then; the lowest number here, Mary Cool's 5U, is dated 1825.

An observation, not a resolution: the S and U numbers otherwise run in date order (Sussex 2123S = 1834 < 2449S = 1846 < 4001S = 1876; Warren 1051U = 1852 < 1832U = 1867 < 3020U = 1884), but Warren 1002U is dated 1868, out of step with 1051U = 1852 immediately below it. Recorded as read; whether the number or the year is the misprint is not something this page can settle.

Data — HUNTERDON COUNTY (suffix J), Vol. II, printed p. 372-ish = PDF p. 193

(Added 2026-08-17 in the same sitting, from Vol. II, to answer [p.129]'s "or adjacent Hunterdon" — see the null section below. Same method: 400-DPI render, 4–5×.)

Eight Cooper entries in the whole Hunterdon County section, and not one John of any form.

Entry 1 is the catalog's own [A.5]. "Cooper, Benjamin, 1704J … Int. 1795" is the intestate file of [p.2] Benjamin Cooper of Hunterdon — the file inside which the misfiled 1868 document sits, the subject of CLAUDE.md's cautionary tale. The index adds one small thing the catalog can use: it records the probate as Book 36, page 168, and dates both the administration and the inventory to 1795 (he died 1794).

The PDF text layer misreads this page too — it renders Eleanor's 3450J as 34.qoJ and William's 5488J as =;488J. Read off the image.

Variant-spelling and boundary checks run on this volume

Per [[feedback_dutch_records_check_kuyper_for_cooper]] and the record-uncertain rule, the obvious ways a Cooper could hide from these blocks were checked before the counts above were treated as complete:

• Kuyper — one hit in the entire 448-page volume, "Kuyper, Hendrick. B. H, p. 449. W. 1764", in the unrecorded/Prerogative section, not Sussex or Warren.
• Cowper — no hit in Sussex or Warren (the three volume-wide hits are all Cowperthwait(e), in other counties).
• Coper / Copper would sort between Cooper and Corselius/Cope; both blocks run straight from the last Cooper to Corselius / Cope, so neither variant is present.
• The blocks are bounded above by Coon and below by Corselius (Sussex) / Cope (Warren), as transcribed above.

The controlled NULL this page establishes

There is no William Cooper in either the Sussex or the Warren section, at any date before 1901. Two further checks, run the same day, agree:

1. (image held in the family archive) — the statewide alphabetical index. Its Cooper run (printed pp. 32–33) holds exactly one William Cooper: "cooper, William … Salem Will 1822" — and not one Sussex or Warren Cooper of any given name.
2. The control that makes that zero mean something. Sussex entries of precisely this era are present and legible on those same two pages — Cool, William, Sussex Int. 1824 and Will 1815; Corter, Philip, Sussex Int. 1811; Corner, Amy, Sussex Will 1814; Cosad, Job, Sussex Will 1815; Cortright, Simon, Sussex Int. 1824; Cory, Job, Sussex Will 1824. ⇒ Sussex probates of 1811–1824 are indexed and findable in this source, and there is no Cooper among them.

A second null, from the same three blocks: no JOHN D. COOPER probate anywhere in Warren, Sussex or Hunterdon

[p.129] John D. Cooper of Hardwick Twp, Warren Co., died 1849 (tree-tier), and his person file carried a bearing: high task to "pull John D Cooper probate file 1849-1850 Warren Co. NJ (or adjacent Hunterdon)". All three candidate counties are now transcribed above, and:

• Warren holds five Cooper estates in the whole pre-1901 index. The nearest to 1849 are Joseph 1051U (1852) and John 1832U (1867) — the latter eighteen years after his death. Nothing between 1825 and 1852 but Joseph.
• Sussex holds four, the earliest 1846 (Elias), the next 1876.
• Hunterdon holds eight, and no John of any form — which also means [p.105] John H. Cooper of Lebanon Twp, Benjamin's proven son and one of the administrators named on 1704J above, left no Hunterdon probate of his own.

⇒ No estate was filed for John D. Cooper in any of the three counties. The 1849 death year is tree-tier, but the Warren block is empty across 1825–1852, so the null holds for any death in that whole span.

What the null does and does not cover. These indexes cover wills, inventories, administrations, intestacies and guardianship files held for the Secretary of State. They do not index county Orphans' Court minute books, which are a separate series kept at the county — the series [A.123] and [A.124] were read in. A partition or Orphans' Court proceeding that generated no filed administration would not appear here.

Cross-references

• A.33 — the Morris County (N) Cooper section of this same volume, 54 entries. Same source, same method.
• A.105 — the Warren file NJSA delivered for Roderick Cooper, numbered 3463U, against this index's printed 2463U.
• [A.123] / [A.124] — Warren Orphans' Court minutes and Surrogate's letters, the county series this state-level index does not duplicate.
• I.64 — the three-volume Aitkin corpus reference.
• p.1746 — the person the Sussex null was run for.
• p.399 — where the Elias / 2449S identification is argued.