Woo! Hat tip to the recent post at the Syracuse.com CNY blog about a new database from the New Jersey State Archives indexing Civil War vouchers, 1861-1865. You can access the free database at https://wwwnet1.state.nj.us/DOS/Admin/ArchivesDBPortal/CivilWarVouchers.aspx.

This collection includes soldiers’ discharge certificates for final pay (over 9000 items), affidavits for pay due to deceased soldiers (over 1400 items) and returns listing the names of soldiers’ families and dependent mothers who received subsistence pay. There are almost 114,000 index entries, but search as closely as you can, because you can’t get more than 500 results at a time.

How to search? You can search by first and last name, regiment, county (you can also note “Out of State”), and years. You can use stemming with % followed by the string you want to find. (The site notes that personal name spelling is “inconsistent,” which is the polite word for it.) I did a search for Stackhouse and got 21 results. Results include name, rank/regiment/company, description (“Payment to Francis Stackhouse / Pay due at discharge. Discharged 8/1/65 at Washington by specail order No. 60.. Total Payment: $7.13”), location (sometimes this is noted as “Unrecorded”), date, and citation.

Once you find something interesting, you can select that record and up to four others to be automatically added to an order form. Ordering copies of the vouchers from New Jersey will run you $5 a record, with a maximum 5 records per order. I couldn’t see a note on the order form that noted how long it would take to turn around a records request.