Snell, History of Hunterdon and Somerset Counties, New Jersey (1881), 1,130 PDF pages - the twelve per-township sections headed CEMETERIES or CEMETERIES AND BURIAL-PLACES (PDF pp. 361, 413, 434, 513, 534, 574, 600, 809, 944, 994-995, 1058), with the Lebanon Township section (PDF p. 513 = book p. 448) and the Bethlehem Township section (PDF p. 534) transcribed; plus the township-boundary evidence at PDF pp. 172, 184 and 445.

What this document records

The finding that matters most is that this book is on disk

[desc] The three-county burial-gap to-do item states that "A Somerset county history does not appear to be on disk and may need acquiring." That is wrong, and has been for as long as the item has existed. (archive file) covers both of the two counties whose step (b) was outstanding, and it is the same author and the same format as the Sussex/Warren volume whose Frelinghuysen section VIII produced [I.207f]'s five-burial-ground list. ⇒ the method already proved on Frelinghuysen applies directly, with no acquisition needed.

The twelve sections

| PDF p. | township (as identified) | what the heading's opening says | |---|---|---| | 361 | Raritan (Flemington) | the Presbyterian, Baptist and Catholic churchyards and Prospect Hill Cemetery; an earlier ground on Mr. Fleming's land from which "most of the bodies were removed" | | 413 | East Amwell | "The only public cemetery in the township, other than the denominational churchyards, is ... the 'Union Cemetery at Eingos' [Ringos]"; also Wertsville Baptist, Pleasant Corner Presbyterian, and an old burial-ground disused sixty years on private property | | 434 | Delaware | "CEMETERIES AND BURIAL-PLACES. There are quite a number of burial-places in this township, but no cemetery association organized"; Rosemont Burial-Ground | | 513 | Lebanon | transcribed in full below | | 534 | Bethlehem | transcribed in full below | | 574 | Tewksbury | the Lutheran at New Germantown, "probably as old as the church", with inscriptions | | 600 | Readington | "burial-places connected with all the churches in the township except the Centreville Methodist Episcopal, also very many family burial-grounds, some of quite early origin" | | 809 | Bridgewater | "The early burial-places were usually small plats of ground on the different farms"; the Coejeman farm ground | | 944 | Branchburg | "CHURCHES AND CEMETERIES" - no church edifice in the township | | 994-995 | Hillsborough | one Indian burial-ground; "Almost all the old families at first had burial-plots of their own"; the Frelinghuysen yard near Weston; two on the Raritan at Vredenberg's and Stryker's; one on the Amwell road west of Flaggtown; a Staats graveyard | | 1058 | Franklin | one Indian burying-ground at the mouth of One-Mile Run |

Lebanon township verbatim and it fills the gap deats leaves

PDF p. 513 = book p. 448, verbatim:

"CEMETERIES. There are several burial-places in this township, some of which are private plats or family grounds on the 'old homestead,' but the one in which the most interest centres is probably the 'Spruce Run Burying-Ground,' which is located about a mile east of Glen Gardner, and opposite the Evangelical Lutheran church." Snell then transcribes inscriptions: Anna Apgar (1795-1877), George Apgar (d. 1864 aged 71), Margaret Stymets (d. 1809 aged 81), Frederick Fritts Jr. (d. 1812 aged 53), Daniel Castner (d. 1839 aged 82), George Moore (d. 1815 aged 90, with his verse "Remember me as you pass by..."), Elizabeth Moore (d. 1810 aged 77), Christopher Martenis, and more. NO COOPER APPEARS IN THE TRANSCRIBED LEBANON INSCRIPTIONS - a null, but a narrow one: Snell transcribes only "an idea of who the pioneers were", not a roster.

Why that null is worth more than most

[desc] [I.69] Deats 1910 transcribes nine Hunterdon burial grounds and LEBANON TOWNSHIP IS NOT AMONG THEM - which the three-county item records as the reason Deats disappoints, since "neither Lebanon Twp nor Kingwood is among them, which is where our Hunterdon Coopers were". John H Cooper John H. Cooper is of Lebanon Township. ⇒ Snell covers exactly the township Deats omits, and says the township's grounds are substantially private family plots on the old homestead - the class no index holds.

Bethlehem township verbatim and the ground it does not contain

PDF p. 534, verbatim:

"CEMETERIES. There are but five burial-places in this township, - two at Bloomsbury, one near West End, one at the Presbyterian church near Junction village, and one in the Baptist churchyard in Junction village." Snell then transcribes inscriptions from the Methodist Episcopal at Bloomsbury (Bartholomew Lott d. 1865; Ann Maria Woolever d. 1845; Phineas Staats 1814-1860; James Cougle 1780-1851; James L. Boss d. 1855; Henry Staats d. 1874; William P. Lott 1818-1873; Electa Larison 1829-1864; Martin J. Foose, d. in the Army of the Potomac 1863; Jacob Y. McElroy, fell at Gettysburg 1863; Peter Foose 1802-1872; John L. Lott 1782-1873) and from the Presbyterian at Bloomsbury. No Cooper in the portion read.

And this is the correction the section exists for

[desc] GRANDIN IS NOT IN SNELL'S BETHLEHEM LIST OF FIVE - and Benjamin Cooper Benjamin Cooper's identity table, [G.134] and [G.722] all place his plot 149 at "Old Bethlehem Presbyterian Churchyard, Grandin (Bethlehem Twp.)". The township is wrong, and Snell supplies the reason in three places: - PDF p. 445: a woman "went to her father's, in Union township, formerly Bethlehem" - Union was set off from the old Bethlehem Township (1853). - PDF p. 172: the 1880 school-building report lists district 52 as "New Stone, Union township" - and "New Stone Cemetery" is one of the Grandin ground's own recorded aliases on Find a Grave, beside "Bethlehem Presbyterian Churchyard" and "Grandin Cemetery" ([G.722]). - PDF p. 184: "Van Sickle's Mine, in Union township, Hunterdon Co., just back of Bethlehem Methodist church" - a church still called Bethlehem standing in Union Township, exactly as the Presbyterian one does. ⇒ the congregation kept the old township's name after the split, and the ground went with Union. Snell's Union Township chapter does treat it: PDF p. 617 places John Crawford's 1765 stone house "near the Bethlehem Presbyterian church", and PDF p. 623 records that the church's first school-house "stood in the southwest corner of the graveyard".

What this changes for benjamin

[desc] Nothing about whether he is buried there - Snell nowhere enumerates that graveyard's burials, and [G.722]'s six controlled searches remain the state of the question. What it changes is where to look next. Anyone working Snell for this ground must read the UNION township chapter, not the Bethlehem one; and the catalog's own description of the place should say Union Twp (formerly Bethlehem), because "Bethlehem Twp." sends a reader to a chapter whose list of five excludes it.

The union chapter does transcribe the grandin churchyard

[desc] t2 ANSWERED THE SAME DAY, AND IN THE AFFIRMATIVE. Snell's Union Township chapter, PDF p. 621 = book p. 516, carries the Bethlehem Presbyterian churchyard's own description and a sample of its inscriptions. Verbatim:

"There is on the north of the old churchyard a beautiful piece of ground, well inclosed with a wooden fence, which several families use as a burial-place. The old churchyard, although it contains the names of a 'multitude of those who have gone before,' has not so many inscribed monuments as we might suppose it would have, owing, no doubt, to the inconvenience of getting them in the early day, when the roads were few and poor. The oldest bears date 1762. Here we find the names of two former pastors, Revs. H. W. Hunt and John Hanna. The latter died Nov. 4, 1801, aged seventy years."

The older inscriptions he gives: John Hacket, died 1766; Col. Abram Bonnell, 1797; Thomas Exton, 1857, aged fifty-nine; Baltes Stiger, 1830, aged sixty-eight; Joseph Bird, 1830, aged sixty; Adam Hope, 1821, aged eighty-one; Jonathan Williams, 1780; John Bray, 1806, aged sixty-eight; Robert Johnson, 1821, aged eighty-eight; John Wilson, 1830, aged seventy-six; John Crawford, 1815, aged eighty-eight; Robert Taylor, 1821, aged eighty; and Jacob Anderson, 1837, aged eighty-three. NO COOPER - but it is a sample, not a roster, and Snell's own Charity (Hoff) Cooper Charity Cooper (d. 1763) is absent from it too although her stone exists and is photographed.

And it explains why no index could ever settle benjamin

[desc] THIS IS THE SENTENCE THAT MATTERS FOR Benjamin Cooper, AND IT IS A CONTEMPORARY STATEMENT ABOUT THE GROUND ITSELF: the churchyard "has not so many inscribed monuments as we might suppose" because early settlers could not get stones to it. ⇒ the ground is documented, in 1881, as holding substantially more burials than stones. [G.722] established by six controlled searches that Find a Grave holds no memorial for Benjamin Cooper in this ground or anywhere in New Jersey, and concluded that "the index cannot support the identification either way". Snell now says why an index never could. A man who died in December 1794 and was buried in a plot he owned, in a yard whose own historian says the early graves largely went unmarked, is exactly the burial no index can hold. That does not make him buried there - it removes the index's silence as an argument against it, which is a different and smaller thing, and the hypothesis stays at possible.

The two sources cross check and mostly agree

[desc] Snell 1881 against [G.722]'s live Find a Grave window for the same ground:

| Snell's inscription | Find a Grave | |---|---| | John Hacket, died 1766 | John Hackett, 1728 - 20 Sep 1766, Grave 259 | | Col. Abram Bonnell, 1797 | LTC Abraham Bonnell Jr., 4 Aug 1732 - 1 Nov 1797, Plot 60 | | Jonathan Williams, 1780 | Jonathan Williams, d. 6 Jan 1788 - A DISCREPANCY | | "The oldest bears date 1762" | earliest in the window: Joseph Turner Hacket, Jul - 18 Aug 1761 |

Two of three named men match on the year, and the oldest-stone claim agrees within a year of the index's earliest burial - which is good mutual corroboration and suggests Find a Grave's coverage of this ground's surviving stones is close to complete. The Jonathan Williams year is unresolved: 1780 against 1788, either an OCR slip in a text layer that elsewhere renders burial as hurial, a misreading of a worn stone by Snell's informant, or two men. Recorded, not resolved.

Bernards township is there after all under a different heading

[desc] t4 ANSWERED, AND IT EXPOSES THE LIMIT OF THE TWELVE-SECTION SWEEP. Bernards Township - which holds Basking Ridge, so Daniel Cooper Sr Daniel Cooper Sr, Grace (Runyon) Cooper Grace Runyon, [G.27] and the 26 Cooper memorials [G.717] counted - does have a burial section, headed BURIAL-PLACES. and not CEMETERIES, at PDF p. 914. That is the second section the keyword sweep missed for exactly this reason; Union Township's was the first. ⇒ the twelve-section list in this entry is a FLOOR, not a count, and any future pass must search BURIAL-PLACES and GRAVEYARDS as well.

Verbatim, in full - it is short:

"BURIAL-PLACES. The oldest burial-place in the township is that at Basking Ridge, the deed for which bears date Feb. 8, 1731. The oldest gravestone discovered in this ground is that of Henry Haines, who died June 9, 1736; but there were probably earlier interments, the first settlers having arrived from 1717 to 1725. Tradition says that the late Col. John Brees is known to have spoken of seeing a stone with the date 1719, though it cannot be found now. The ground is inclosed by a strong stone wall, and filled thickly with graves bearing the names of representatives of the old families and their descendants for four and five generations. Many quaint and interesting inscriptions might be given did space permit. We give only that of the oldest person buried here: 'Here lies the body of John McCollum, who departed this life April the 18th A.D., 1760, in the 103d year of his age.' The other churchyards which contain repositories of the dead are of a considerable later date, and present nothing worthy of special mention."

What the bernards section is worth

[desc] Three things, and the third is the one that bears on a live question. 1. A documentary foundation date for the catalog's most important burial ground: the Basking Ridge plot was deeded 8 February 1731. Nothing in the catalog held that. 2. Snell enumerates ONE burial-place for the whole township - the others "present nothing worthy of special mention" - so for Bernards the county-history route gives a single ground, and it is the one already swept. 3. THE EARLY BURIALS THERE ARE UNMARKED OR LOST, ON SNELL'S OWN EVIDENCE. The oldest stone he could find in 1881 was 1736, he says plainly that "there were probably earlier interments", and he reports a stone of 1719 that had already vanished. ⇒ this is the same finding as the Grandin churchyard's, reached independently in a different township: the ground is "filled thickly with graves" and the surviving stones are a subset of the burials. IT BEARS DIRECTLY ON Agnes Cooper AGNIETJE CUPER. [G.725] tested her three candidate burial grounds the same day and found Basking Ridge null because [G.717]'s 26-memorial Cooper roster begins with her own mother, Grace, who died in 1755 - eighteen years after Agnietje's supposed death in May 1737. Snell shows the ground was in use from 1731 at the latest and that its pre-1760 burials largely went unstoned. That does not put her there. It does mean the 1755 floor is a property of the SURVIVING STONES and not of the ground, which is a materially weaker null than it looked.

The keyword resweep and why it mattered

[desc] Prompted by Bernards and Union both hiding under BURIAL-PLACES., the whole volume was re-searched. BURIAL-PLACES returns 19 hits on 16 pages - MORE than CEMETERIES (13 on 12). GRAVEYARDS returns 1, BURYING-GROUNDS none. ⇒ the twelve-section list above was roughly half the book's township burial sections. New ones located: PDF 435 (field-stones at either end of the grave), 456 ("many private or farm burying-places"), 501 (Friends' burying-ground at Quakertown), 649 (Clinton - oldest graves at Lebanon, "no evidence remains"), 869-871 (Bedminster - Lamington churchyard, and a union cemetery to which "many remains were removed from the other burial-places"), 914 (Bernards), 1096 (Rocky Hill), 1115 ("Throughout the township the churchyards are occupied as burial-places ... There are some exceptions, as in the case of private groun[ds]"), 1122.

Lamington churchyard is a ground this catalog has never swept

[desc] PDF p. 869-870, Bedminster Township, and it is the most consequential thing the re-sweep turned up. Verbatim:

"THE LAMINGTON CHURCHYARD is doubtless the oldest cemetery in the township. The land was deeded to the Presbyterian Church of Lamington in March, 1743, by James Alexander and Daniel D. Dunstar, who were the original purchasers of a large tract where Lamington now stands. The church, however, was built before this time, and burials had been made in the grounds. The first of which any record is extant was that of Hephzibah, wife of William Jones, who died in 1740."

AND TWO OF THE FAMILIES DANIEL SR'S CHILDREN MARRIED INTO ARE AMONG ITS STONES. Snell's sample includes: - "Bryan Lefferty, Esq., 1749, sixty-four" - so born about 1685. Margaret (Lafferty) Cooper is MARGARET LAFFERTY COOPER (1743-1825), wife of George Cooper George Cooper, Daniel Sr's son, and Bryan Lafferty Cooper is BRYAN LAFFERTY COOPER (1775-1798), a grandson carrying the name, whose stone stands at Basking Ridge ([G.717]). - "Hugh Gaston, Sr., Dec. 23, 1772, eighty-five" and "Hugh Gaston, Jr., June 25, 1808, seventy-five". Rosanna (Cooper) Gaston ROSANNA (COOPER) GASTON, Daniel Sr's daughter, married Robert Gaston Robert Gaston. - Also Craigs (John 1753, Moses 1775, Dr Aaron 1785, Robert 1797), Porters, Hamlins, Barclay, Ker, McDowell. ⇒ a burial ground of exactly the right date, denomination and county, holding the in-law families of two of Daniel Sr's children, and the catalog has never looked at it.

And lamington is a second candidate for benjamin himself

[desc] [M.29] records that Benjamin Cooper signed the 1792 Lamington (Bedminster) Presbyterian charter-amendment petition and donated to Lamington in November 1793 - the very same month and the very same kind of act that underpins the Bethlehem Presbyterian burial hypothesis at [G.722]. The catalog has used that fact to argue for Bethlehem and has never asked it of Lamington. WHAT THE INDEX ALREADY SAYS, and it is a real answer: [G.717] swept Somerset County for surname Cooper with deaths 1700-1900 and tabulated the result by ground - Basking Ridge 26, Old Somerville 7, Evergreen 7, New Somerville 4, Bound Brook 3, Harlingen 1, Millington Baptist 1, North Branch Reformed 1. LAMINGTON IS NOT IN THAT TABLE, so Find a Grave holds no Cooper there for the whole two centuries. ⇒ the index answer is null, and by the lesson this entry has now reached twice - at Grandin and at Basking Ridge - an index null over an eighteenth-century churchyard is a statement about surviving stones. Lamington goes on the list as possible, below Bethlehem (where he owned a plot) and above nothing.

The full lamington inscription sample

[desc] Snell's complete sample, PDF pp. 869-870, verbatim in his order: Hephzibah, wife of William Jones, d. 1740 (the earliest recorded burial); Elizabeth, wife of Isaac Ross, d. 2 June 1741, aged 29; Elizabeth, wife of William Hamlin, 4 July 1746, aged 33; Ann, wife of Richard Porter, 7 Sept 1747, 31; Bryan Lefferty, Esq., 1749, 64; John Craig, 23 May 1753, 65; Hugh Gaston, Sr., 23 Dec 1772, 85; Hugh Gaston, Jr., 25 June 1808, 75; Moses Craig, 31 July 1775, 75; Dr. Aaron Craig, 31 Aug 1785, 37; Robert Craig, 1797, 63; Samuel Barclay, January 1750; William Ker and Catharine his wife, 1777; Ephraim McDowell, 2 Mar 1762, 74; Capt. Thomas Weir, of the Bucks County militia, "departed this life 26th Jan'y, 1777, aged 35 years"; Capt. John McCarter, 14 Oct 1777, 63, and Margaret his wife, 1769, 45; Michael D. Henry, "counselor-at-law in the city of New York", 2 May 1799, 39; David Henry, January 1783, 55; John Lefferty, 1776, 35; Elizabeth his wife, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Jones, 1772, 26; Catharine, wife of Maj. Richard McDonald, 23 July 1813, 79. Snell adds that "the families of Linn, Porter, McKinstry, Traphagen, Henry, and many others are buried here", with three former pastors - Revs. James McCrea, Jeremiah Halsey and William Boyd.

And it gives a deduced ancestor a gravestone

[desc] Margaret (Lafferty) Cooper MARGARET LAFFERTY COOPER (1743-1825), wife of George Cooper George Cooper, carries a father: key naming BRYAN LEFFERTY - and her own file says of him: "Craddock [I.22] entry 202 opens 'Direct evidence for this ancestor is lacking' - Bryan Lefferty's EXISTENCE is his deduction from this very parentage statement." Her file also records parents: unknown in prose and carries an open task for her family of origin, guessing "possibly Long Hill / Mendham / Bernards Morris Co." SNELL TRANSCRIBES HIS GRAVESTONE. "Bryan Lefferty, Esq., 1749, sixty-four" - a real man, died 1749, born about 1685, buried in a Scots-Irish Presbyterian churchyard in Bedminster, SOMERSET Co., not Morris. And a second Lefferty of Margaret's own generation lies there: John Lefferty, 1776, aged 35, born about 1741 against her 1743. WHAT THIS DOES AND DOES NOT DO. It does not prove he is her father, and the arithmetic mildly argues against it - a man born about 1685 would be 58 at her birth, which is possible but reads more naturally as a grandfather, with John Lefferty (b. c. 1741) a brother or cousin rather than a parent. What it does is turn Craddock's deduced ancestor into a documented person with a date, an age, a place and a denomination, and point her family of origin at Somerset rather than Morris - which is where her file has been guessing. The catalog's Bryan Lafferty Cooper Bryan Lafferty Cooper (1775-1798) carries the name into the next generation.

Bedminsters other grounds and three ways a burial leaves the record

[desc] PDF p. 871 continues the Bedminster section past Lamington, and between them the passages are a catalogue of the ways a burial stops being findable. Verbatim:

1. A GROUND THAT HAS VANISHED ENTIRELY. "[On land] owned by Ellis Tiger, there was also a burial-place, in which monuments were standing as late as 1812, but of which nothing now remains." ⇒ a burial ground with stones within living memory of Snell's informants, and gone by 1881.

2. A WHOLESALE RELOCATION, IN 1875. "In 1875 four acres were purchased of Elias Philhower and William Hilliard on an elevated spot in the upper part of the village for a 'union cemetery.' The grounds were handsomely laid out, and many remains were removed from the other burial-places and deposited in the new ground." ⇒ the same trap [G.719] met at Long Hill, where "Old Cemetery holds the graves, Cooper Family Memorial holds the stones". A memorial in the Peapack union cemetery may be a stone moved in 1875 from somewhere else, and a null in an older Bedminster ground may mean the occupant was moved out of it.

3. PRIVATE FAMILY GROUNDS, NAMED. "The Jeroleman family burying-ground is in the centre of the village. The Lane family burying-ground is situated about half a mile west of Van Vliet's Mills." Plus the Methodist church land at Peapack, given in 1838 and "also used for a burial-place", and the ground around the Reformed church at Peapack, whose first burial was Mrs Barnabas Horton "interred there before the church was completed, in January, 1850".

And peapack is not a neutral place name for this catalog

[desc] Daniel Cooper Sr Daniel Cooper Sr has a documented Peapack connection: his marriage to Barbara Margaret Trimmer took place at the Maelick Old Stone House in Peapack Valley, Barbara being there as the cousin of Charlotte (Mrs Aaron) Maelick when "Daniel Sr arrived from Long Hill for the wedding" (recorded on Daniel Cooper Sr from the Quarrie newspaper article). That is a marriage, not a burial, and nothing here touches where anyone is buried - but it means Bedminster and Peapack are places this family was in, not merely the next county. Worth holding against the Bedminster grounds above rather than reasoning from.

Hillsborough and a second older harlingen burial ground

[desc] PDF pp. 994-995, Hillsborough Township, Somerset Co., verbatim:

"Only one Indian burial-ground can now be identified in Hillsborough... Almost all the old families at first had burial-plots of their own, or sometimes several would combine, as was the case with the Harlingen company who settled in 1710. The church land given by Peter Sonmans, where the FIRST HARLINGEN CHURCH stood, was also used as a cemetery, and is probably the oldest in the township. It is just on the border of Hillsborough, near Van Aken Station, on the Philadelphia Railroad. A graveyard exists also by the Millstone church, and no doubt began to be used with the building of the first church, in 1766. The oldest stone that can now be found dates back to 1774, and commemorates a Peter Stryker, who died Dec. 18, 1774... Several of the Frelinghuysens are buried here, but there is a Frelinghuysen yard about two miles north of Millstone, near Weston, surrounded by a brick wall... There are two cemeteries on the banks of the Raritan, near the beginning of the South Branch, respectively on the places of Vredenberg and Stryker. A graveyard also exists on the Amwell road, a little west of Flaggtown. A Staats graveyard exists on the..."

⇒ for one township Snell names eight or more distinct burial places, of which the index holds a handful, and says outright that almost all the old families began with plots of their own.

And it qualifies this same days g725

[desc] WITHDRAWN THE SAME HOUR IT WAS WRITTEN. THE CLAIM BELOW WAS WRONG AND IS KEPT ONLY SO THE REASONING IS VISIBLE.

WHAT I WROTE: that Snell's sentence about "the church land given by Peter Sonmans, where the FIRST Harlingen church stood ... probably the oldest in the township" meant [G.725] had swept the wrong enclosure - that the present Belle Mead churchyard postdates a move, and that a child baptised at Harlingen in 1732 and dying in 1737 would lie at an older Sonmans site near Van Aken Station.

WHAT REFUTES IT, and it was already on disk: [F.222] is the printed GMNJ transcription of this congregation's own records, and its introduction says in terms:

"The Harlingen Reformed Dutch Church was organized May 18, 1727, under the direction of Rev. Henricus Coens, of Aquackanonck, and a small wooden building was erected by the congregation at present day Belle Mead, where the old cemetery established there is still in use."

⇒ the Belle Mead ground IS the congregation's original burial ground, established with the 1727 organisation - five years before Agnietje's baptism. [G.725] swept the right place.

AND THE TWO SOURCES ARE PROBABLY NOT IN CONFLICT AT ALL. GMNJ puts the church in Montgomery Township; Snell describes the site as "just on the border of Hillsborough" - i.e. from the Hillsborough side of the Montgomery line, which is where Belle Mead sits. The "first Harlingen church" Snell means is most likely the same 1727 wooden building. What GMNJ does record as a second site is a SPLINTER: during the Coetus-Conferentie controversy "one group withdrew and erected its own building (1750-52) on the site of the present church", and on reunion "the old church was abandoned, and in due time demolished" - a 1750s event, two decades after the baptism, and so irrelevant to a 1737 burial either way.

THE LESSON, which is this afternoon's own in miniature: a county historian's passing geographic aside was read as better evidence than the congregation's own published record, which the catalog already held and which I had cited earlier the same day - [G.725] t1 asks whether [F.222] covers burials, and reading its first page would have settled this before the claim was made rather than after.

Clinton township and the old graveyard at lebanon

[desc] PDF p. 649, verbatim:

"BURIAL-PLACES. Doubtless the oldest graves to be found in Clinton township are in the old graveyard at Lebanon, but no evidence remains to prove the assertion, since many of those oldest graves are without headstones, while such as are thus marked boast no legible legends. There is an old burial-place on the John Fulkerson place, near Annandale, but, save in the cases of two graves that have been especially cared for, the resting-places of the dead in that spot are unmarked except by here and there a fragment of a headstone."

Lebanon is John H Cooper John H. Cooper's place - see the Lebanon Township section above, which is the one [I.69] Deats omits.

The conclusion of step b for these two counties

[desc] SNELL SAYS THE SAME THING IN TOWNSHIP AFTER TOWNSHIP, AND IT IS THE ANSWER THE THREE-COUNTY ITEM WAS LOOKING FOR. Not where the grounds are - that is the enumeration - but what the grounds can be expected to yield:

| township | Snell's own words | |---|---| | Union (Grandin, Benjamin Cooper's plot) | the churchyard "has not so many inscribed monuments as we might suppose it would have, owing ... to the inconvenience of getting them in the early day" | | Bernards (Basking Ridge, Daniel Cooper Sr and [G.27]) | oldest stone 1736 though "there were probably earlier interments"; a 1719 stone already lost by 1881 | | Clinton (the old graveyard at Lebanon) | "many of those oldest graves are without headstones, while such as are thus marked boast no legible legends" | | Lebanon | "some of which are private plats or family grounds on the 'old homestead'" | | Delaware (p. 435) | "merely the common field-stone placed at either end of the grave" | | Hillsborough | "almost all the old families at first had burial-plots of their own" | | Readington | "very many family burial-grounds, some of quite early origin" | | Bridgewater | "The early burial-places were usually small plats of ground on the different farms" | | Bedminster | one ground "of which nothing now remains"; and an 1875 union cemetery into which "many remains were removed from the other burial-places" | | Franklin, Somerset (p. 1115) | churchyards used "according to the immemorial custom of the English people. There are some exceptions, as in the case of private groun[ds]" |

⇒ a Find a Grave null over an eighteenth-century Somerset or Hunterdon burial is a statement about surviving, legible stones and about volunteer transcription of them - not about whether the person lies there. That is the same conclusion [I.258] reached for Rockaway by a different route (eight of Munsell's nineteen grounds absent from the index, and they are the deedless and unenclosed ones). Two counties, two county historians, two methods, one answer.

WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THE 165. The three-county gap list is mostly "nobody looked", and making those searches is still the work. But it also means a completed search will often return a null that cannot be strengthened by any further index work, and the honest next corpus is the one that owes nothing to a gravestone: church burial registers, sexton and plot books, and the GSNJ card files - exactly what [guidance/reference_nj_burial_records_beyond_find_a_grave.md] sets out.